Anarchy, Groups, and Conflict: An Experiment on the Emergence of Protective Associations

This article investigates the implications of the philosophical considerations presented in Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by examining group formation in a laboratory setting where subjects engage in both cooperative and conflictual interactions. It endows participants with a commodity used to generate earnings, plunder others, or protect against plunder. The primary treatment allows participants to form groups to pool their resources. It conducts a baseline comparison treatment that does not allow group formation. This article finds that allowing subjects to organize themselves into groups does lead to more cooperation and may in fact exacerbate tendencies towards conflict.

Find article at Springer Link.