Does Government Regulation Complement Existing Community Efforts to Support Cooperation? Evidence from Field Experiments in Colombia

In this paper we describe a field experiment conducted among mollusk harvesters in a community on the Pacific Coast of Columbia. The experiment is based on a standard linear public good and consists of two stages. In the first stage we compare the ability of monetary and nonmonetary sanctions among community members to increase contributions to the public good. In the second stage we add a government regulation with either a high or low sanction for noncompliance to community enforcement efforts. The results for the first stage are consistent with other comparisons of monetary and nonmonetary sanctions within groups; both led to higher contributions. The results from the second stage reveal that government regulations always complemented community enforcement efforts. While the subjects tended to reduce their sanctioning efforts under the government regulations, contributions and earnings were significantly higher than without government interventions. In fact, the combination of community and government enforcement efforts generated near-perfect contributions to the public good. However, more research into the combined roles of government intervention and community enforcement efforts is needed because the complementarity we find may be situation-specific.