Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
6-2009
Abstract
We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator’s demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.
Keywords
dictator games, beliefs, baseline altruism, directed altruism, social networks
Discipline
Behavioral Economics | Social Media
Research Areas
Applied Microeconomics
First Page
1
Last Page
31
Publisher
SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series, No. 09-2009
City or Country
Singapore
Citation
LEIDER, Stephen; MOBIUS, Markus M.; ROSENBLAT, Tanya S.; and DO, Quoc-Anh.
What Do We Expect from Our Friends?. (2009). 1-31.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1148
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
Published in Journal of the European Economic Association, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.tb00497.x