Taking, Giving, and Impure Altruism in Dictator Games

Oleg Korenok, Edward Millner () and Laura Razzolini ()
Additional contact information
Edward Millner: Department of Economics, VCU School of Business

No 1301, Working Papers from VCU School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: We show that, if giving is equivalent to not taking, impure altruism could account for List's (2007) finding that the payoff to recipients in a dictator game decreases when the dictator has the option to take. We examine behavior in dictator games with different taking options but equivalent final payoff possibilities. We find that recipients tend to earn more as the amount the dictator must take to achieve a given final payoff increases, a result consistent with the hypothesis that the cold prickle of taking is stronger than the warm glow of giving. We conclude that not taking is not equivalent to giving and agree with List (2007) that the current social preference models fail to rationalize the observed data.

Keywords: Dictator Game; Impure Altruism; Taking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D01 D64 H30 H41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2013-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~okorenok/repec_files/Ta ... bmit_19_Aug_2013.pdf Revision (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Taking, giving, and impure altruism in dictator games (2014)
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:vcu:wpaper:1301

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from VCU School of Business, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oleg Korenok ().