Spousal Dictator Game: Household Decisions and Other-Regarding Preferences

Abstract

Using a laboratory experiment, we collected data on dictator giving among student strangers and married couples in a suburban area in the United States. Confirming common belief and prior empirical evidence, we find that giving among spouses is greater than giving among anonymous students. We further investigated factors associated with spousal giving which may provide insight for the development of future theories, or into explaining other-regarding preferences. Our data shows that giving is positively associated with who manages household money and controls household income. This result is robust after controlling for each spouse’s personal income and using various econometric specifications. The results suggest that spousal giving may be due to household economic roles in addition to other-regarding preferences.

Social and Moral Distance in Risky Settings

“…A handful of experimental economics studies have related social distance to the ability of the dictator to identify his counterpart (see, e.g., Bohnet and Frey 1999;Frohlich et al 2001;Burnham 2003;Charness and Gneezy 2008). 1 Other experiments have manipulated social distance by varying the degree to which participants know each other, from being strangers to being friends or family members (see, e.g., Leider et al 2009;Brañas-Garza et al 2010;Gnagey et al 2018). 2 In this study, we use photos of the recipients to shorten the social distance between the two parties.…”