Donations, risk attitudes and time preferences: A study on altruism in primary school children

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe present experimental evidence from a bilingual city in Northern Italy on whether the language spoken by a partner in a prisoner's dilemma game affects behavior and leads to discrimination. Running a framed field experiment with 828 six-to eleven-year old primary school children in the city of Meran, we find that cooperation generally increases with age, but that the gap between cooperation among in-group members and cooperation towards children speaking another language is considerable and increasing with age. This gap is due to both, in-group favoritism and language group discrimination. JEL-Code:C91, C93, D03

Value homophily benefits cooperation but motivates employing incorrect social information

“…The Donation game has been utilized as an existence proof for the evolution of cooperation in highly mobile societies (Nowak and Sigmund, 2005). It can be described as a specific instantiation of the Prisoner's Dilemma (Suzuki and Kimura, 2013;Masuda, 2012;Uchida and Sigmund, 2010) and continues to be used for studying cooperation both theoretically (Tanabe et al, 2013;Masuda, 2012;Hilbe et al, 2013;Stewart and Plotkin, 2013;Uchida and Sasaki, 2013;Marshall, 2011Marshall, , 2009Nakamura and Masuda, 2012) as well as experimentally (Angerer et al, 2014;Sommerfeld et al, 2008). We confirm that the Donation game and the spreading of reputation can be used to sustain cooperation (Panchanathan and Boyd, 2003;Nowak and Sigmund, 2005).…”

How to measure time preferences in children: a comparison of two methods

“…6 Uncertainty was furthermore reduced by the fact that the choice-list experiment was the third experiment conducted with these children. Therefore children had already experience with economic experiments (on social preferences; see Lergetporer et al, 2014, or Angerer et al, 2015 and receiving delayed payoffs (from previous experiments that were not related to intertemporal choice, though).…”

“…Ensuring comprehension is particularly challenging in the growing field of experiments with non-student subject pools such as low-educated persons, indigenous groups or children (see, for instance, Eckel et al, 2013;Angerer et al, 2015).…”

Social Discounting under Risk

“…It was found that locally superior information on benefits made risk-averse individuals more likely to link to friends of friends. Angerer et al (2014) demonstrated that risk was closely related to prosocial behavior, but the relationship between risk preference and reciprocal altruism has not been clearly studied or explained. Rand and Epstein (2014) discussed altruism under extremely risky and costly conditions; however, the conclusion is difficult to generalize.…”