Experimental Evidence on Public Good Behavior across Pakistan’s Fractured Educational System

Funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implemented by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the PSSP provides analysis in four areas: agricultural production and productivity; water management and irrigation; macroeconomics, markets and trade; and poverty reduction and safety nets. The PSSP is undertaken with guidance from the Government of Pakistan through the federal Planning Commission and a National Advisory Committee, and in collaboration with Innovative Development Strategies (Pvt) Ltd. (IDS), Islamabad, and other development partners. This working paper is an output from a Competitive Grants Program (CGP) grant awarded in June 2012. The CGP is a component of the PSSP that provides support to Pakistani researchers on topics addressing the PSSP and related objectives. The goals of the CGP are to strengthen social science research within the academic community of Pakistan and to produce quality papers on important development policy issues. The study adopts identity as a central concept and demonstrates how the institutional and the economic environments in which individuals exist forge their identities and, in turn, their behavior. The objective of this study is to investigate how Pakistani university students from distinct education streams behave. The study explores three types of universities which form three identity groups in the context of the Pakistani educational landscape: Elite English-medium universities with a liberal arts curriculum, public and private sector universities which cater to middle and lower middle-income students, and madrassas. These groups are further sliced across gender lines. The experimental results help break down existing stereotypes by showing that both male and female madrassa students are the most generous. Female madrassa students also punish the least. Moreover, the study finds more gender and social consciousness in men than women when deciding to penalize or not. Male madrassa students penalize female students more than other male students, while elite male students penalize female students less than male students in the other two identity groups, suggesting hostility towards women diminishes in higher income groups. With respect to male elite students, the study observes them penalizing madrassa students more heavily than fellow elite students, suggesting the presence of spite among the elite boys towards high contributors. The study's findings have significant implications for understanding public good behavior in the context of Pakistan's fractured educational system. The results suggest that identity plays a crucial role in shaping behavior, and that individuals from different educational backgrounds and socio-economic status exhibit distinct patterns of cooperation and punishment. The study's findings also highlight the importance of considering the social and gender dimensions of cooperative and penalizing behavior in the Pakistani context.