NORMS MAKE PREFERENCES SOCIAL

We explore the idea that prosocial behavior in experimental games is driven by social norms imported into the laboratory. Under this view, differences in behavior across subjects is driven by heterogeneity in sensitivity to social norms. We introduce an incentivized method of eliciting individual no...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the European Economic Association 2016-06, Vol.14 (3), p.608-638
Main Authors: Kimbrough, Erik O., Vostroknutov, Alexander
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
C91
C92
D03
Economic models
Game theory
Norms
Social norms
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Summary:We explore the idea that prosocial behavior in experimental games is driven by social norms imported into the laboratory. Under this view, differences in behavior across subjects is driven by heterogeneity in sensitivity to social norms. We introduce an incentivized method of eliciting individual normsensitivity, and we show how it relates to play in public goods, trust, dictator, and ultimatum games.We show how our observations can be rationalized in a stylized model of norm-dependent preferences under reasonable assumptions about the nature of social norms. Then we directly elicit norms in these games to test the robustness of our interpretation.
ISSN:1542-4766
1542-4774
DOI:10.1111/jeea.12152