The Impact of Social Ties on Group Interactions: Evidence from Minimal Groups and Randomly Assigned Real Groups

Lorenz Goette, David Huffman and Stephan Meier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2012, vol. 4, issue 1, 101-15

Abstract: Economists are increasingly interested in how group membership affects individual behavior. The standard method assigns individuals to "minimal" groups, i.e. arbitrary labels, in a lab. But real group often involve social interactions leading to social ties between group members. Our experiments compare randomly assigned minimal groups to randomly assigned groups involving real social interactions. While adding social ties leads to qualitatively similar, although stronger, in-group favoritism in cooperation, altruistic norm enforcement patterns are qualitatively different between treatments. Our findings contribute to the micro-foundation of theories of group preferences, and caution against generalizations from "minimal" groups to groups with social context. (JEL C92, D64, D71, Z13)

JEL-codes: C92 D64 D71 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mic.4.1.101
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (129)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/mic.4.1.101 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mic/data/2010-0103_data.zip (application/zip)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/mic/app/2010-0103_app.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejmic:v:4:y:2012:i:1:p:101-15

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is currently edited by Johannes Hörner

More articles in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().