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Research Details
What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Journal of the European Economic Association
Abstract
We conduct a field experiment in a large realâ€world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients' beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e., directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity toward named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no more accurate in recognizing intrinsically altruistic allocators. Recipient beliefs are significantly less accurate than the predictions of an econometrician who knows the allocator's demographic characteristics and social distance, suggesting recipients do not have information on unobservable characteristics of the allocator.
Type
Article
Author(s)
Stephen Leider, Markus Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do
Date Published
2010
Citations
Leider, Stephen, Markus Mobius, Tanya Rosenblat, and Quoc-Anh Do. 2010. What Do We Expect From Our Friends?. Journal of the European Economic Association.(1): 120-138.