What Do We Expect From Our Friends?

Stephen Leider, Markus Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat and Quoc-Anh Do
Additional contact information
Stephen Leider: Ross School of Business - University of Michigan [Ann Arbor] - University of Michigan System

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients' beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator's demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.

Keywords: Social network; Allocator; Coordination task (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03460126
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published in Journal of the European Economic Association, 2010, 8 (1), pp.120 - 138. ⟨10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.tb00497.x⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03460126/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What Do We Expect from Our Friends? (2010)
Working Paper: What Do We Expect from Our Friends? (2010)
Working Paper: What Do We Expect from Our Friends? (2009)
Working Paper: What Do We Expect from Our Friends? (2009)
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:hal:journl:hal-03460126

DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-4774.2010.tb00497.x

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD (hal@ccsd.cnrs.fr).