What Do We Expect from Our Friends?

Quoc-Anh Do (), Stephen Leider, Markus Michael Mobius () and Tanya Rosenblat
Additional contact information
Stephen Leider: Harvard University
Tanya Rosenblat: Iowa State University

No 09-2009, Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics

Abstract: 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. While 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 towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator’s demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.

Keywords: dictator games; beliefs; baseline altruism; directed altruism; social networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 C91 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-sea and nep-soc
Date: 2009-06
View list of references

Published in SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series

Downloads: (external link)
https://mercury.smu.edu.sg/rsrchpubupload/15345/ExpectFriends.pdf (application/pdf)

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:siu:wpaper:09-2009

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by QL THor ().