Partnership Formation: The Role of Social Status

Haimanti Bhattacharya () and Subhasish Dugar ()
Additional contact information
Haimanti Bhattacharya: Department of Economics, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112
Subhasish Dugar: Department of Economics, University of Calgary, Alberta, Calgary T2N 1N4, Canada

Management Science, 2014, vol. 60, issue 5, 1130-1147

Abstract: We experimentally test for the effect of social status on the likelihood of partnership formation. We consider a two-player game where the opportunity to perform a hidden action by one player may render partnership formation difficult. In this context, we study how the assignment of partners' status to the top, middle, or bottom position of a preexisting status hierarchy affects collaboration. We find that partnership formation is remarkably sensitive to the partners' status affiliations. Collaboration is easiest when both partners share the same social status, and the probability of partnership formation decreases significantly as the status gap between the partners increases, entailing massive inefficiency. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics .

Keywords: partnership; status; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1818 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:60:y:2014:i:5:p:1130-1147

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().