Consequences of Cooperation: Linking Cooperative Attitudes, Behavior and Outcomes in a Large-scale Experiment

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The importance of the concept of cooperation in social dilemmas in economics, psychology, and biology is unquestioned. The vast majority of our empirical knowledge on cooperation relies on laboratory experiments in parsimonious setups. However, how cooperation in an experiment translates to 'real'-life cooperation decisions within an organization and how 'real' life cooperation can be explained by exogenous institutions are under-researched topics. The gap in the literature that we want to fill concerns two main aspects:(I) Cooperation within an organization: We study cooperation and cooperative norms within an organization (a large company) and relate it both to the incentive structure set by the organization and relevant outcomes in the professional context at hand. We provide novel evidence on (a) the extent to which cooperation makes teams in a competitive environment more or less successful with respect to the goals of the teams/the organization; (b) whether cooperative individuals are more or less likely to be promoted; (c) whether cooperative individuals are liked more by their subordinates and superiors; (d) how cooperative attitudes/behavior interact(s) with different incentive mechanisms in a real-world setting; and (e) how or to what extent a cooperative culture within an organization shields individuals against stress and stress-related illnesses.(II) External validity of incentivized measures of cooperation: To elicit behavioral types with respect to cooperation, economists usually rely on validated experimental measures. As these measures so far have mostly been used in the laboratory, our study fulfills a second, methodological purpose by assessing the external validity of laboratory measures of cooperation in a lab-in-the-field setting. We want to learn (a) how experimentally elicited levels of cooperation correlate to cooperative behavior 'in the wild' (in the real world); and (b) to what extent we can predict cooperative behavior in the real world by using standard measures in experimental economics, augmented by other observable variables. The external validity of measures of cooperative behavior from the experimental laboratory has not been addressed systematically, in particular within a workplace context.Our project will answer these research questions in a unique setting. In collaboration with SAP S.E., we are able to run fully incentivized online experiments with up to 1,000 employees. Using an pseudonymization key that makes the identification of individual respondents impossible, we can link the data from the experiments that elicit cooperative behavior and individual norm perception (including a large set of controls) with objective outcome variables from the company (team cohesion, identification with the team and the firm, individual success, promotions, incentive schemes,...). We are the first to systematically address the context and consequences of cooperative behavior in a professional environment.