Urban development and cooperation games

Abstract

This paper investigates what makes developers and municipal planning authorities more (or less) likely to cooperate. It borrows methods from behavioural economics for eliciting the propensity of cooperation in different groups under different circumstances. Participants from private development companies, public planning, and related fields have played simple games in which they chose whether to cooperate in an urban transformation scenario (N = 269). By altering minor details, we learn about what makes people cooperate. The paper is able to quantify some human biases affecting the actions we observe in development projects: The findings indicate that people tend to be more cooperative towards people from the same sector, are less likely to cooperate in riskier scenarios, and in situations where some group members have fewer resources to contribute to the cooperative effort. Hopefully, the novelty of using economic experiments on planning and property development decision making could serve as an inspiration for other researchers in the field, although the methodology does carry limited external validity.