Dominance and Submission: Social Status Biases Economic Sanctions

Emma von Essen () and Eva Ranehill ()
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Eva Ranehill: Dept. of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics, Postal: Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, SE-113 83 Stockholm, Sweden

No 732, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: Social hierarchy is persistent in all almost all societies. Social norms and their enforcement are part of sustaining hierarchical systems. This paper combines social status and norm enforcement, by introducing status in a dictator game with third party punishment. Status is conveyed by surname; half of the third parties face dictators with a noble name and half face dictators with a common name. Receivers all have common names. We find that social status has an impact on behavior. Our results indicate that low status men are punished to a greater extent than low status women, high status men, or high status women. Interestingly, discrimination occurs only in male to male interaction. For offers below half, or almost half of the allocated resource, male third parties punish male dictators with common names almost twice as much as their noble counterparts. We find no support for female discrimination. This result suggests that social status has important implications for men’s decisions to use economic punishment, and that this holds true in situations where reputation or strategic concerns have no importance.

Keywords: Status; punishment; discrimination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2011-01-11, Revised 2011-04-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: Dominance and Submission: Social Status Biases Economic Sanctions (2011)
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