Quotas and Cooperation

Selection by quotas is an important policy measure in the affirmative action tool box. Despite quotas being effective for achieving certain numerical representations, they can come with unwanted side effects, for example in the form of uncooperative behavior in the group created by the quota. In the laboratory, we investigate the extent to which preferential selection in the form of an unrepresentative quota impacts group cooperation and examine the underlying mechanisms. In the experiment we create two groups by randomly assigning subjects colors. In the unrepresentative quota treatment, subjects of one color are selected into a privileged group by performance in an unrelated task whereas subjects of the other color are selected solely based on the quota. We compare contributions in a public good game in this treatment to behavior in a control treatment, where the two colors are treated symmetrically and all members of the privileged group are selected by performance. Our results show significantly less cooperation in the former treatment and we furthermore find that all players in the group are similarly affected. This effect is persistent even when subjects are given a rationale for the unrepresentative performance quota, e.g., by appealing to efficiency or fairness arguments. The negative effect on cooperation from the unrepresentative quota disappears when selection is made completely randomly instead of by performance.