Challenges for Market and Institutional Design when Countering Exploitation Strategies

Cooperation within larger groups is often endangered by incentives to free ride. One goal of market and institutional design is to create environments in which socially efficient cooperation can be achieved. The main point in this chapter is that only considering first-order incentives to cooperate within a larger group may not be suffi cient, as subcoalitions display reciprocal behavior despite the incentives to renege. Three related complications are discussed: (a) exploitative behavior is often coordinated in subgroup coalitions, (b) natural within-group resistance to exploitation already exists, and (c) the actions of group members can often only be imperfectly monitored. Given these realities, implications of current research for applied market and institutional design are outlined.