In a field experiment

Bruno Frey and Stephan Meier

Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: People behave pro-socially in a wide variety of situations that standard economic theory is unable to explain. Social comparison is one explanation for such pro-social behavior: people contribute if others contribute or cooperate as well. This paper tests social comparison in a field experiment at the University of Zurich. Each semester every single student has to decide whether he or she wants to contribute to two Social Funds. We provided 2500 randomly selected students with information about the average behavior of the student population. Some received the information that a high percentage of the student population contributed, while others received the information that a relatively low percentage contributed. The results show that people behave pro-socially, conditional on others. The more others cooperate, the more one is inclined to do so as well. The type of person is important. We are able to fix the "types" by looking at revealed past behavior. Some persons seem to care more about the pro-social behavior of others, while other "types" are not affected by the average behavior of the reference group.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (545)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00243.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:feb:natura:00243

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Natural Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().