What do we Expect from our Friends?

Abstract

We conduct a field experiment in a large real‐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. (JEL: C73, C91, D64)

The Impact of Social Ties on Group Interactions: Evidence from Minimal Groups and Randomly Assigned Real Groups

“…Many other experiments vary social distance or social ties in the lab by lifting anonymity, which makes it difficult to isolate anonymity effects from effect of social ties (e.g., Dufwenberg and Muren 2006). 3 The results contribute as well to the related literature on social networks, which finds stronger prosocial behavior between individuals with strong social ties (Dufwenberg and Muren 2006;Leider et al 2009Leider et al , 2010Goeree et al 2010). A key open question in that literature is whether strong ties affect prosocial behavior, or whether people become friends with individuals towards whom they are inclined to be prosocial.…”

Trust and the Strength of Ties in Online Social Networks: An Exploratory Field Experiment

“…We believe this element of our design, which we adopted from the experimental economics literature (e.g., Leider et al 2010), has multiple strengths. First, it forces the Sender to assess the underlying level of trust as a function of varying social tie strength between the three Receivers, which is exactly the effect we want to capture.…”

“…It employs decisions involving monetary transfers to examine whether, and to what extent, trust is exhibited between two transacting parties. By coupling this trust measure with social "strength of ties" measures, our work builds upon Leider et al (2010), in its deployment of non-anonymous versions of what were traditionally anonymous games (Berg et al 1995) to link social distance and trust in an online context. An innovation of our paper is the custom Facebook application we develop specifically to play this game amongst "friends", thereby generating a quantified trust measure.…”

A field study on matching with network externalities

“…8 Several recent papers have mapped friendship networks in order to test for their effects on behavior in experimental games (for example, Leider et al 2010;and Goeree et al 2010).…”