Culture, Motives, and Other-Regarding Preferences of First Nations People of Canada

Shashi Kant and Ilan Vertinsky

Review of Behavioral Economics, 2019, vol. 6, issue 4, 347–386

Abstract: Unconditional generosity towards unknown others in a community is an important determinant of its social capital. We develop a two-player double-index utility model that explains individual choices to display unconditional generosity to unknown others. Our model incorporates the influence of individuals’ selfish and ‘other-regarding’ motives, their community embeddedness, group identities, and social norms, to predict choices. We tested the model through field experiments in a First Nation of Canada using modified Dictator Games. The experiments included a retrospective elicitation of motives and provision to dictators of no, or partial information about the identities of second players. Results revealed strong relationships among expressed motives, social norms, group identities, and allocations. First Nation’s culture was manifested by a pattern of more generous giving to elders and women. Provision of partial information about second players’ identities was found to increase average giving and shift self-regarding to other-regarding preferences.

Keywords: Dictator game; Endogenous preference; First nation; Identity; Motives; Other-regarding preference; Social distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 C93 D63 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/105.000001110 (application/xml)

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:now:jnlrbe:105.00000110

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Review of Behavioral Economics from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().