The Control Of Free-ridings And The Improvement Of Overall Cooperation

The decline of cooperation has been noticed in studies in organizations, we call it "the decay of cooperation". It has been observed and discussed in studies of sociology, ethology and economics, and become an important cross-disciplinary topic. Some scholars have proposed to solve this problem through persons’heterogeneous social preferences. They classified persons into different types:Cooperators, Reciprocators, Free-riders and so on. Reciprocators are conditional cooperators, their behaviors are influenced by their own belief of cooperation. Only in the case that they think others would cooperate, they will choose to cooperate. Most persons are reciprocators. In 2001, professor Urs Fischbacher, Simon Gachter and Ernst Fehr from University of Zurich pointed that, free-riders influenced reciprocators’belief, made them incooperative gradually, then the cooperation decayed. In 2005, Robert M. Burlando and Francesco Guala reviewed pertinent literature and proposed a four-step method to identify the types of subjects. They conducted another public good experiment after isolated the free-riders, and observed significant improvement of the overall cooperation.This paper is based on four experiments. E1 is aimed to put subjects into four different types:Cooperator(C), Reciprocator(R), Free-rider(F) and Noise(N). We isolate F in the public good experiment of E2, but the improvement of overall cooperation is not significant, change of the sample proportion is a possible reason. Afterwards, we turn the focus to F. Previous scholars refer F as someone would not to cooperate in any case. We refute this opinion through literature review and logical analysis, and point that F would not always free-ride. We try to design different situations to influence F, to make them cooperative, then to protect reciprocators’belief, and we can prevent "the decay of cooperation". On the basis of personality, we design two situations for E3 and E4, trying to influence the behavior of free-riders through economic and psychological method. In E3, costly punishment is added to public good experiment, other subjects can choose to punish free-riders by a little cost. In E4, referring to the research framework of Spotlight Effect from social psychology, we require the free-riders to proclaim profits of each period. Data contradicts the economic method and supports the psychological one.