Why Do People Respect Property? Bringing Plato's Ring of Gyges to the Lab

Marco Faillo (University of Trento)

Matteo Rizzolli (LUMSA University)

Stephan Tontrup (Max Plank Institute Jena)

Abstract: Abstract The institution of property is void without legal and social enforcement against theft. While theft is the oldest and simplest of social dilemmas (it increases the welfare of thieves but it is harmful for society as a whole) societies have long developed strategies that encompass -inter alia- behavioral traits, social norms and legal institutions to promote the respect and enforcement of property rights. Ethologists have also uncovered a growing body of evidence suggesting the existence of an innate and hardwired sense of property in many animal species. Why do people respect property? Because of an intrinsic respect or because of fear of legal and social enforcement? In this paper we show that people indeed respect property itself. Yet the origin of the property affects how strongly this respect is. To address our research questions we devise an experimental protocol that puts Plato's Ring of Gyges thought experiment to an empirical test. As the ring granted Gyges invisibility allowing him to steal property without any risk of detection and punishment, our study presented participants with an opportunity to steal while granting strict anonymity to participants in a double blind procedure. We implement a free-form dictator game (List, 2007) in which people can both give lottery tickets to a passive counterpart or take them from him. We manipulate the origin of the tickets property. In one treatment we asked subjects to buy these tickets with their own money and bring them to the laboratory (capital treatments). In a second treatment we gave participants the opportunity to earn their ticket in the lab by completing an effort task (labour treatments). Even though we implemented an extreme Gyges-like anonymous environment we find evidence that people respect property. Our results also show that property earned in the effort task was more likely to be respected than the property subject's had brought from outside the lab, that did not reveal how it was earned.