Social motives vs social influence: An experiment on interdependent time preferences

Ismael Rodriguez-Lara and Giovanni Ponti ()

Games and Economic Behavior, 2017, vol. 105, issue C, 177-194

Abstract: We design an intertemporal Dictator Game to test whether Dictators modify their discounting behavior when their own decision is imposed on their matched Recipients. We run four different treatments to identify the effect of payoffs externalities from those related to information and beliefs. Our descriptive statistics show that Dictators display a marked propensity to account for the intertemporal preferences of Recipients, both in the presence of externalities (social motives) and/or when they know about the decisions of their matched partners (social influence). We also perform a structural estimation exercise to control for heterogeneity in risk attitudes. As for individual behavior, our estimates confirm previous studies in that high risk aversion is associated with low discounting. As for social behavior, we find that social motives outweigh social influence, especially when we restrict our sample to pairs of Dictators and Recipients who satisfy minimal consistency conditions.

Keywords: Social preferences; Risk and time preferences; Social influence; Belief elicitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D70 D81 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:105:y:2017:i:c:p:177-194

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2017.06.007

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