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Full-Text Articles in Behavioral Economics
Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do
Directed Altruism And Enforced Reciprocity In Social Networks, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do
Research Collection School Of Economics
We conducted online field experiments in large real-world social networks in order to decompose prosocial giving into three components: (1) baseline altruism toward randomly selected strangers, (2) directed altruism that favors friends over random strangers, and (3) giving motivated by the prospect of future interaction. Directed altruism increases giving to friends by 52% relative to random strangers, whereas future interaction effects increase giving by an additional 24% when giving is socially efficient. This finding suggests that future interaction affects giving through a repeated game mechanism where agents can be rewarded for granting efficiency-enhancing favors. We also find that subjects with …
What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do
What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do
Research Collection School Of Economics
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 …