 Do What (You Think) the Rich Will Do: Inequality and Belief Heterogeneity in Public Good ProvisionWorking Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance Abstract: Beliefs about others’ cooperativeness are among the strongest determinants of cooperative behaviours. Beliefs about different others, however, are not necessarily uniform, nor necessarily related to past behaviours: different expectations about different others might solely originate from differences in observed individual characteristics. Finally, not all such beliefs need drive conditional behaviour alike. In an experimental public good game with heterogeneous endowments, I ï¬ nd that rich subjects are expected to cooperate more by both rich and poor individuals, and that behaviours of both the rich and poor signiï¬ cantly correlate only with beliefs about the rich. I further ï¬ nd that an intervention aimed at downplaying the salience of heterogeneity has no impact on neither beliefs nor cooperation. I conclude with implications for information dissemination about uncooperative behaviour in the mass media and avenues for further research. Keywords: belief formation; cooperation; experiment; group identity; inequality; public goods (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpi:wpaper:tax-mpg-rps-2017-06_4 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC. |
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