Feelings of Ownership in Dictator Games

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

No 1704, Working Papers from VCU School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper determines if differences in feelings of ownership mediate the effect of changing who earns the endowment and the frame of actions on dictatorsÕ generosity. We conduct an experiment with two treatments. The Dictator Earns-Give treatment is designed to induce strong feelings of ownership, while the Recipient Earns-Take treatment induces weak feelings of ownership. We measure feelings of ownership in the two treatments. As expected, dictators report stronger feelings of ownership in the first treatment and these feelings mediate the dictatorÕs generosity. Moving from the Recipient Earns-Take treatment to the Dictator Earns-Give treatment indirectly reduces the payoff to the recipient by increasing the dictatorsÕ feelings of ownership.

Keywords: dictator game; feelings of ownership; altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~okorenok/repec_files/Fe ... torgames_Feb2017.pdf Revision (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Feelings of ownership in dictator games (2017)
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:1704

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 ().