What is in a surname? The role of ethnicity in economic decision making

Ali Ahmed

Applied Economics, 2010, vol. 42, issue 21, 2715-2723

Abstract: This article reports results from two experiments that investigate possible incidence of discrimination against people with foreign backgrounds in Sweden. In the first experiment, participants played the trust game and the dictator game with co-players of different ethnic affiliation. The family name of the players was exposed to their co-players. Results for the trust game showed no significant discrimination against co-players with foreign backgrounds. On the other hand, the results for the dictator game showed a statistically significant discriminatory behaviour by men against co-players with non-European backgrounds. The discriminatory behaviour was solely a male phenomenon. In the second experiment, the dictator game was replicated to check the stability of the results in the first experiment. The second experiment also examined whether people with foreign backgrounds discriminate against other people with foreign backgrounds; that is, the purpose was to discover whether discrimination is systematic. The observations in the second experiment underlined the results found in the first experiment: foreign co-players are discriminated against by Swedish players. However, we did not find that people with foreign backgrounds discriminated against other people with foreign backgrounds.

Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036840801964609 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:42:y:2010:i:21:p:2715-2723

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036840801964609

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().