Group payoffs as public signals

Ioannou, Christos A.; Qi, Shi; Rustichini, Aldo

doi:10.1016/j.joep.2015.03.003

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Strong in-group biases have been found by Chen and Chen (2011), Charness et al (2007) or Chakravarty and Fonseca (2014) in designs that were not truly minimal. Ioannou et al (2016) find in-group biases only in settings where group identity is reinforced by displaying group payoffs. There is also strong evidence of the role of priming in reinforcing identity-based behaviour and preferences (Benjamin et al, 2010;Van Bavel et al, 2008).…”

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confidence: 82%

Identity, homophily and in-group bias

Currarini

Mengel

2016

European Economic Review

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a b s t r a c tMany instances of social interaction display either or both of the following well-documented phenomena. People tend to interact with similar others (homophily). They also tend to treat others of shared social identity more favorably (in-group bias). While both phenomena involve some degree of discrimination towards others, a systematic study of their relations and interplay is yet missing. In this paper we report the findings of an experiment designed to address this issue. Participants are exogenously and randomly assigned to one of two groups. Subsequently they play a sequence of eight games with either an in-group or an outgroup member. In treatment EXO in-and out-group matches are formed exogenously, while in ENDO participants can choose between in-and out-group matches. We find strong evidence of in-group bias in EXO, and strong evidence of homophily in ENDO. In-group biases, however, either decrease or disappear altogether under endogenous matching. We show that self-selection of homophilous agents into in-group matches cannot explain this fact. We also find that homophily is strongly correlated with risk aversion, and we build on this evidence to derive a rationale for both the existence of homophily and the disappearance of in-group biases under endogenous matching.

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confidence: 82%

Identity, homophily and in-group bias

Currarini

Mengel

2016

European Economic Review

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“…However, because trustees have a selfish temptation to keep the entire amount for themselves, such cooperation by investors is potentially costly and involves the risk of exploitation by their trustee. While some studies found that participants give more money to ingroup compared to outgroup trustees (e.g., Fershtman & Gneezy, 2001; Hargreaves Heap, Verschoor, & Zizzo, 2009; Ioannou, Qi, & Rustichini, 2012), other studies found no evidence of intergroup discrimination in the trust game (Güth, Levati, & Ploner, 2008; Johansson-Stenman, Mahumud, & Martinsson, 2005).…”

Section: Intergroup Discrimination In Cooperationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: A meta-analysis.

Balliet

Dreu

2014

Psychological Bulletin

842

612

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Although theory suggests individuals are more willing to incur a personal cost to benefit ingroup members, compared to outgroup members, there is inconsistent evidence in support of this perspective. Applying meta-analytic techniques, we harness a relatively recent explosion of research on intergroup discrimination in cooperative decision making to address several fundamental unresolved issues. First, summarizing evidence across studies, we find a small to medium effect size indicating that people are more cooperative with ingroup, compared to outgroup, members (d = 0.32). Second, we forward and test predictions about the conditions that moderate ingroup favoritism from 2 influential perspectives: a social identity approach and a bounded generalized reciprocity perspective. Although we find evidence for a slight tendency for ingroup favoritism through categorization with no mutual interdependence between group members (e.g., dictator games; d = 0.19), situations that contain interdependence result in stronger ingroup favoritism (e.g., social dilemmas; d = 0.42). We also find that ingroup favoritism is stronger when there is common (vs. unilateral) knowledge of group membership, and stronger during simultaneous (vs. sequential) exchanges. Third, we find support for the hypothesis that intergroup discrimination in cooperation is the result of ingroup favoritism rather than outgroup derogation. Finally, we test for additional moderators of ingroup favoritism, such as the percentage of men in the sample, experimental versus natural groups, and the country of participants. We discuss the implications of these findings for theoretical perspectives on ingroup favoritism, address implications for the methodologies used to study this phenomenon, and suggest directions for future research.

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“…Falk & Zehnder (2013) frame the results of their field experiment in terms of, "in-group effects" rather than out-group effects. Similarly, Ioannou et al (2015) posit that one of their experimental treatments is, "sufficient to invoke an in-group bias" in trust and dictator games, when only comparing behaviour from in-group and out-group interactions. As Goette et al (2006) highlight, in-group favouritism and out-group negativity produce the same predicted outcome, and are indistinguishable when a baseline or group-neutral comparison is excluded.…”

Section: Table 3: Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One explanation for why we do not observe in-group favouritism could be that the English treatment is not a strong enough experimental manipulation, or it was unsuccessful in inducing an in-group sense of identity. To shed light on this, we examine self-reported levels of group attachment, or Closeness, as is standard in the literature (Chen & Li, 2009;Ioannou et al, 2015;Yamagishi & Kiyonari, 2000).…”

Section: Table 3: Summary Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discrimination in a deprived neighbourhood: An artefactual field experiment

Grosskopf

Pearce

2017

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization

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We present a field experiment designed to examine the discriminatory motives of an understudied demographic: the poorest people in England. Subjects are first asked to divide £10 between two strangers, and then play a £10 dictator game with another stranger. We subtly vary the ethnicity of the receivers by providing subjects with surnames randomly drawn from the electoral register, including treatments that allow us to parse behaviour into either in-group favouritism or out-group negativity, an important behavioural distinction that is typically overlooked in the discrimination literature. Our results suggest that the observed discriminatory attitudes are the result of out-group negativity rather than in-group favouritism. We advance the literature on discrimination through the estimation of a structural model of groupcontingent social preferences, which we exploit to perform counterfactual simulations. Our results provide insights into the behaviour of this unique demographic and provide a rationale for why they may support discriminatory policies in their voting behaviour.* Financial support from the Birmingham Experimental Economics Laboratory (BEEL) and the ESRC is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Luke Lindsay for comments and participants at the 5th Annual Xiamen University International Workshop on Experimental Economics, the Inaugural PhD conference at the University of Leicester, the ESA European Meetings in Heidelberg, and those at the University of Exeter brown bag for helpful discussions.

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Group payoffs as public signals

Cited by 10 publications

References 29 publications

Identity, homophily and in-group bias

Identity, homophily and in-group bias

Ingroup favoritism in cooperation: A meta-analysis.

Discrimination in a deprived neighbourhood: An artefactual field experiment

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