Altruism in the (social) network

This study presents evidence from a field experiment on the prevalence of favoritism at school. Children compete in teams in a tournament in a real effort experiment with two rounds. They report which group member they prefer to do the task in the second round, providing them with a small privilege. Using information about their social network and their individual performance, we are able to identify the importance of friendship ties. We find that friendships are very important for all age groups. Performance is an important criterion for the older children, but not for the younger ones. While this suggests that the children favor their friends, we also find an offsetting effect: children who are favored increase their subsequent performance. This means that, what looks like favoritism ex ante, may actually maximize performance ex post.JEL Classification Numbers: D630, D640, J130, J150

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“…Similar results are found for college students by Mobius et al. (2004) and Brañas‐Garza et al. (2006).…”

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confidence: 90%

Friendships and Favouritism on the Schoolground – A Framed Field Experiment

Bélot

Ven

2011

The Economic Journal

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“…6 Thus, the design of the experiment seeks to avoid the existence of risk dominant equilibria. 7 ii) Strategic uncertainty. We reduce this e¤ect by making that the maximum and minimum payo¤s players can obtain with each strategy do not di¤er in more than 1 experimental unit so, the problem of players choosing a particular strategy because they assure higher expected payo¤s practically disappears.…”

Section: Second Stage: Coordination Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…6 See for example Schmidt, Shupp, Walker and Ostrom (2003). 7 As a consequence, the only Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies for both games is , that is playing each strategy at random with equal probability, independently of the role of the player.…”

Section: Second Stage: Coordination Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The dark side of friendship: ‘envy’

Cobo-Reyes

Jiménez

2012

Exp Econ

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“…In Leider et al (2009) we conduct other experiments with the same subject pool to distinguish directed altruism between socially close subjects from norms of reciprocity that are supported by the repeated super-game played between subjects in the social network. In subsequent research, Goeree et al (2008) use our design to measure directed altruism in a school network of teenage girls (also see Brañas-Garza et al (2006) for experimental data with European university students). Although these studies confirm our findings of directed altruism, they do not measure beliefs about expected generosity of others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What do we Expect from our Friends?

Leider

Rosenblat

Möbius

et al. 2010

Journal of the European Economic Association

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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. (JEL: C73, C91, D64)

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Altruism in the (social) network

Cited by 10 publications

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Friendships and Favouritism on the Schoolground – A Framed Field Experiment

Friendships and Favouritism on the Schoolground – A Framed Field Experiment

The dark side of friendship: ‘envy’

What do we Expect from our Friends?

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