2016/02/18 by Eva Witesman, Andrew Heiss · 1 voice · 2 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Community Development and Social Impact #Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies #Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering
paper · doi:10.1007/s11266-016-9684-5
openalex publication_date 2016/02/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Abstract Collaboration and its promotion by funders continue to accelerate. Although research has identified significant transaction costs associated with collaboration, little empirical work has examined the broader, societal-level economic outcomes of a resource-sharing environment. Does an environment that encourages collaboration shift our focus toward certain types of social objectives and away from others? This paper uses agent-based Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that collaboration is particularly useful when resources are rare but a social objective is commonly held. However, collaboration can lead to bad outcomes when the objective is not commonly shared; in such cases, markets outperform collaborative arrangements. These findings suggest that encouraging a resource-sharing environment can lead to inefficiencies even worse than market failure. We also demonstrate that failure to account for transaction costs when prescribing collaboration can result in quantifiably lower outcome levels than expected.