Opportunismo e coordinamento: soluzioni regolative e istituzionali

The present paper builds on Arrighetti e Curatolo, 2009, 2010 by introducing heterogeneous opportunists into an agent-based simulated world populated by heterogeneous loyal agents playing a repeated coordination game. On average, opportunistic exploitation of economic resources lowers coordination, especially in less endowed contexts. Simulation strategy proposed in the paper compares, keeping constant the aggregate cost of policy, three different kinds of public schemes aimed at reducing the economic cost of opportunism: regulatory schemes, incentive (or premiality) schemes and a third scheme based on institutional catalyst agents. Regulatory schemes based on sanctions produce the emergence of adverse redistribution effects: removal of opportunism is an efficient strategy only for less endowed local contexts, while the policy taxation burden hits too much the local environments where collective action is stronger. In line with many authors (see Hall, 2005; Camerer e Hogarth, 1999; Verdier, 2004), incentive (premiality) schemes perform badly especially because their net effects are limited to the first stages of the games. The schemes based on institutional catalyst agents seems to be the best performers: in facts, these schemes are efficient, especially through a process of learning, in pulling the other agents toward an high degree of coordination, so counter-balancing the effects of opportunists’ exploitation. Moreover an high degree of synergy emerges from a combined regulatory-institutional catalyst scheme, while incentive scheme (premiality) show, at the opposite, negative synergy both with institutional catalyst agents’ and regulatory schemes.