著者

柴田 愛子 森 徹 曽山 典子 岡村 誠

出版者

関西学院大学

雑誌

Working papers series. Working paper

巻号頁・発行日

vol.14, pp.1_a-15, 1999-10

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Bullying in school which would be detrimental to the development of human resources is a serious problem in Japan as well as in other countries. Bystanders rarely report instances of bullying to teachers, parents and other authorities. In our study, bystander behavior is modeled as a non-cooperative game by assuming that bullying can be stopped by a teacher only when more than a certain number of students report the instances. Every bystander stands to gain from the resolution of bullying activity (i.e. the consumption of public goods). But when a bystander reports this activity, that bystander will have to deal with psychological and / or physical costs (i.e. the private costs) if the total number of reports falls below the required minimum. We see that one of the two stable symmetric Nash equilibria is reached, depending on the threshold numbers, payoffs and the costs of reporting. At one equilibrium, all bystanders report the instances of bullying to their teacher. and at the other equilibrium, no one reports. The results of our experiments support our model and the expected payoff-maximizing behavior of bystanders. From this the major policy implication reached is that by lowering the number of students in a classroom, reporting activities of bystanders would increase. Other policy suggestions which could serve to increase reporting activity of bystanders include reducing the threshold number for reporting from students, increasing the disutility of students' observing bullying behavior, and mitigating the psychological and / or physical costs for the reporting of bullying.