Collective intentions of the social economy: An experiment on the community currency of the French Basque country

Community currencies (CCs) are common social economy instruments for aligning market transactions with social commitments. They change incentives, encouraging trade within the CC network, but may also symbolize and thereby amplify users’ commitment to social values of solidarity and cooperation. The behavioral effect of the second channel, moreover, is clouded by endogenous use of the CC: commitment encourages use, but does use also trigger commitment? We disentangle the direction of causality with a lab-in-the-field ultimatum game experiment, which confronts participants with a choice between more or less competitive responses. By exogenously varying the currency in which the game is played (CC or euros), we isolate the causal effect of the CC on behavior. Self-declared regular users of the currency are less competitive when playing in the CC than when playing in euros. This is not due to unobserved differences in the individuals, because when playing in euros, their behavior is the same as non-users’. Nor is it due to non-convertibility of the CC, as non-users’ behavior is not affected by the currency. We therefore isolate the CC as a “trigger of cooperativeness” for those who have a base-level of commitment to it.