2018年5月9日開催 公開研究会開催報告 （非線形経済理論研究会）

2018年５月９日(水) 公開研究会を開催しました。

【テーマ】

①Social Capital as an Instrument for Common Pool Resource Management:
   A Case Study of Irrigation Management in Sri Lanka

②How can we induce more women to competitions?

【報告者】

① 曾田 剛史 氏（日本貿易振興機構アジア経済研究所研究員）
② 矢ヶ崎 将之 氏（東京大学大学院経済学研究科博士後期課程）
 

【日   時】 2018年5月9日（水）15:00～18:00

【場   所】 中央大学多摩キャンパス 2号館4階 研究所会議室1

【要　旨】

  ①　Although social capital is considered to be a key instrument for common pool resource management, its effect among heterogeneous players such as upstream and downstream farmers along an irrigation canal is not clear. Using a combination of lab-in-the-field experiments to measure social capital and household survey data in a unique natural experimental setting, this study shows that upstream farmers with higher trust toward the downstream farmers are more likely to be satisfied with their water usage. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that upstream farmers with higher trust demand less water and leave more water in a canal because they expect reciprocal behavior from downstream farmers. Since the incentive structures of irrigation management closely resemble those of the standard experiments to measure social capital, this finding also provides a unique case study of the real-world relevance of these experiments.

 

②　Why do women avoid participating in competitions and how can they be encouraged to participate?  Here, I investigate how social image concerns affect women's decisions to compete. We first propose a theoretical model to show that participating in a competition is costly for women from the social image viewpoint, since such behavior deviates from traditional female gender norms. This results in women's lower standing in competitive environments, even under affirmative action policies favoring women, when decisions to compete are observed. We posit and theoretically demonstrate that introducing prosocial incentives in a competitive environment is effective and robust to public observability, since (i) it induces women who are intrinsically motivated by prosocial incentives to a competitive environment and (ii) it makes participating in a competition not costly for women from the social image viewpoint. To this end, we conduct a laboratory experiment, randomly manipulate the public observability of decisions to compete, and test our theoretical predictions. The results of the experiment are fairly consistent with the theoretical predictions. We suggest that, when designing policies to promote gender equality in competitive environments, using prosocial incentives through company philanthropy or other social responsibility policies as either substitutes or complements to traditional affirmative action policies, could be promising.