Do Social Preferences Increase Productivity? Field Experimental Evidence from Fishermen in Toyama Bay

Jeffrey Carpenter () and Erika Seki
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Erika Seki: University of Aberdeen

No 1697, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to measures obtained from a field experiment with a population of participants who face a social dilemma in their daily lives (i.e., team production), we do find strong links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the stock of social preferences evolves endogeously with respect to how widely team production is utilized.

Keywords: field experiment; social preference; income pooling; productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D21 D24 H41 J24 M52 M54 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-eff, nep-exp, nep-pbe and nep-soc
Date: Written
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Working Paper: Do Social PreferencesIncrease Productivity? Field experimental evidence from fishermen in Toyoma Bay (2005)
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