Cooperation and Effort, Reciprocity and Mutual Supervision in Worker Cooperatives

This paper formalizes the determination of effort in work teams as a social dilemma, adding a mutual-monitoring activity and reciprocity motivations to the formal model of effort provision in cooperatives. It turns out that the cooperative solution is viable in a work group in which the workers frame effort as a reciprocal gift, and if they do frame effort in this way in worker cooperatives, this could explain the observed tendency of cooperatives to attain higher productivity.