arbiter
JournalsPricingAccount

It Takes Two to Tango: Nudging Cooperative Behavior with a Proverb

Nourhan A. Hassan

Review of Law & Economics2025https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2024-0054article
AJG 2ABDC B
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

Abstract To align private and public interests in social dilemmas, formal regulations have been developed providing enforcement mechanisms to promote cooperation and decrease free riding. Although formal rules sanctioning free riders and rewarding cooperators work in some cases, they are costly to implement. In addition, unless individuals’ behavior is observed and external monitoring is high, these legally binding rules are not effective. In a 2 × 2 lab experimental design, this paper investigates whether a proverb reflecting an injunctive norm of cooperation can foster voluntarily cooperative behavior in a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM) with low monitoring and no punishment mechanisms. The utilized proverb is found to increase contribution. In addition, the findings show no significant difference between the proverb’s effect and the effect of a non-proverbial injunctive intervention. Moreover, social type is not found to have a moderating effect as there is no significant difference between the responses of prosocials and proselfs to the two injunctive interventions. The results of this paper imply that cultural proverbs could be used by policy makers as a soft low-cost intervention in social marketing campaigns.

1 citation

Open paper page →

Cite this paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2024-0054

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{nourhan2025,
  title        = {{It Takes Two to Tango: Nudging Cooperative Behavior with a Proverb}},
  author       = {Nourhan A. Hassan},
  journal      = {Review of Law & Economics},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1515/rle-2024-0054},
}

Paste directly into BibTeX, Zotero, or your reference manager.

Flag this paper

It Takes Two to Tango: Nudging Cooperative Behavior with a Proverb

Flags are reviewed by the Arbiter methodology team within 5 business days.

Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.