Reciprocity under moral wiggle room: Is it a preference or a constraint?

Tobias Regner

Experimental Economics, 2018, vol. 21, issue 4, No 3, 779-792

Abstract: Abstract We analyze reciprocal behavior when moral wiggle room exists. Dana et al. (Econ Theory 33(1):67–80, 2007) show that giving in a dictator game is inconsistent with distributional preferences as the giving rate drops when situational excuses for selfish behavior are provided. Our binary trust game closely follows their design. Only a preceding stage (safe outside option vs. enter the game) is added in order to introduce reciprocity. We find significantly lower rates of selfish choices in the trust baseline in comparison to our treatments that feature moral wiggle room manipulations and a dictator baseline. It seems that reciprocal behavior is not only due to people liking to reciprocate but also because they feel obliged to do so.

Keywords: Social preferences; Pro-social behavior; Experiments; Reciprocity; Moral wiggle room; Self-image concerns; Trust game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D03 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10683-017-9551-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
Working Paper: Reciprocity under moral wiggle room: is it a preference or a constraint? (2017)
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:kap:expeco:v:21:y:2018:i:4:d:10.1007_s10683-017-9551-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10683-017-9551-2

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().