Group identity in markets

Endogenous Group Formation in Experimental Contests

“…In our contest framework of competition with an out-group, group coherence and group spirit might be stronger if players self-select into the alliance. This phenomenon of in-group bias, or group solidarity, and its implications on economic outcomes have been analyzed and documented in a variety of di¤erent economic interactions: for instance, prisoner's dilemma and battle of the sexes (Charness et al 2007), minimum e¤ort games (Chen and Chen 2011), dictator and response games (Chen and Li 2009), market experiments (Li et al 2011) and investment decisions (Sutter 2009). 8 Most …ndings in this literature support the emergence of in-group solidarity in social interactions, especially if group membership is made salient.…”

Inducing Natural Group Identity: A RDP Analysis

“…We consider five target papers in our analysis: Hoff and Pandey (2006), Afridi et al (2010), Chen et al (2010) and Li et al (2011) as well as Benjamin et al (2010), which we have already reviewed in the introduction. Our goal is to verify how the experiments described in these target papers fare when a RDP analysis is applied to them in the context of two specific potential confounds, which we have labeled as C1 (experimenter demand effects) and C2 (spurious creation or enhancement of natural group identity) as they may originate from natural group category priming.…”

“…Before undergoing a Hoff and Pandey (2006) type of manipulation of publically revealing the group each child belonged to, the children had to answer a questionnaire to prime either their city or rural identity (i.e., they were asked whether they considered themselves Beijing locals). In their natural group treatment, Li et al (2011) again primed group natural identity by the means of a…”

“…In a RDP framework, what we need to do is to evaluate the relevance, distinctiveness and plausibility of these two potential confounds, as applicable to this as well as in other papers. Specifically, we shall also be focusing on Hoff and Pandey (2006), Afridi et al (2010), Chen et al (2010) and Li et al (2011). All of these papers use natural group priming in key treatments.…”

“…Li et al (2011) have a treatment with an artificial group manipulation rather than a natural group manipulation, and so formulating objectives in terms of natural group manipulations could be dropped entirely in favor of making the paper stand purely on the artificial group manipulation. 4 In the case of Benjamin et al (2010), the experiment does not show the effects of specific natural groups norms on time and risk preferences, let alone an effect on 'fundamental economic preferences', but, if we reformulate the experimental objective to one of how stereotype threat affects time and risk preferences for specific natural group categories, and if one buys the magnifying glass relevance argument that such stereotype threat may indeed be one that exists for people making time and risk preferences decisions in the real world the paper does provide information about this, then the paper is informative insofar as this more modest objective is concerned.…”