Journal
AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
Volume 4, Issue 1, Pages 101-115Publisher
AMER ECONOMIC ASSOC
DOI: 10.1257/mic.4.1.101
Keywords
-
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Economists are increasingly interested in how group membership affects individual behavior. The standard method assigns individuals to minimal groups, i.e. arbitrary labels, in a lab. But real groups often involve social interactions leading to social ties between group members. Our experiments compare randomly assigned minimal groups to randomly assigned groups involving real social interactions. While adding social ties leads to qualitatively similar, although stronger, in-group favoritism in cooperation, altruistic norm enforcement patterns are qualitatively different between treatments. Our findings contribute to the micro-foundation of theories of group preferences, and caution against generalizations from minimal groups to groups with social context. (JEL C92, D64, D71, Z13)
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available