Page 10 countries and contexts, involving a wide variety of groups; from university students, and children, to adults without formal literacy or numeracy in foraging small-scale societies.<sup>6</sup> The specific details of each game will vary, depending on the specific preferences that they are designed to capture. LTEs are always designed with a clear research objective in mind, and employ real money in order to recreate as closely as possible the incentives that individuals face in the real-life situations that the games aim to simulate and elucidate.

35. The games were designed to yield insights into parents‟ preferences for participation, i.e. their willingness to forgo personal payoffs in order to hold teachers to account **.** In the games, participants‟ roles were matched to their real life roles in the school. The games were designed to mimic key aspects of the school context: teachers having resources that they might or might not pass on to their pupils, and parents having the choice to forgo personal resources to hold teachers to account. In the games, a player (teacher) is invited to divide a sum of money between herself and another player (a parent), and a third player (another parent) can pay to have money subtracted from the first player‟s allocation.<sup>7</sup> It is the third players‟ behavior that is of particular interest, as by choosing to “fine” they reveal both what they consider to be unfair behavior on the part of the first player, as well as their own willingness to pay to express this opinion. In other words, the third player is expressing their willingness to hold the first player to account for how the resources were divided (“fairly” or “unfairly”) between themselves and the passive second player.

36. However, the games were also designed to differ from the actual school context in several important ways, particularly with respect to the information parents have and how they can act on it. In the actual school context parents‟ decisions to hold school directors and teachers to account usually require that the parents expose themselves, whereas in the game parents were guaranteed at least some anonymity (teachers who were fined do not know which parents fined them). While in the school context the costs associated with participation may differ across parents, in the game the material cost of holding teachers to account was fixed and known by all. Finally, in the actual school context, parents may be uninformed about the existing participatory institutions and the actual performance of teachers, whereas in the game, parents were fully informed about how they can hold teachers to account and can condition their decisions on accurate measures of teacher performance. Therefore, the game can be viewed as a _counterfactual_ to the existing situation in Albania‟s primary schools. In this counterfactual information is not constrained, parents wishing to participate in holding teachers to account are afforded some protection (anonymity), and the consequences of their participation are clearly defined. Most importantly, in the game the manner in which parents could hold teachers to account was simple and clear, and the parents were fully informed. This being the case, the games afforded an opportunity to take a first glimpse at the parents‟ preferences for participation in holding teachers to account. The findings discussed are presented in Tables 10-12 in Part III.

37. Parents‟ decisions in the game were significantly related to their wealth and levels of education; however, their participation in actual school accountability structures was not significant. Not surprisingly, the decision to forgo personal resources to hold teachers to account (to fine) in the game was more likely among wealthier and better educated parents. Unexpectedly, parents who participate in actual school accountability structures (as parent class representatives of on school boards) were no more likely to engage in fining in the game. Further parents who were less informed about the schools their children attended were no less willing to participate in fining in the games.

> 6 See Barr et al. (2009) for an example of a cross-cultural experimental study based on the implementation of similar experimental designs to the ones we use here in 15 different small-scale societies.

> 7 The LTE discussed is a version of Fehr and Fischbacher‟s (2004) Third Party Punishment Game (TPG).