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This paper studies the effects of social status - a socially recognized ranking of individuals - on prosocial behavior. We use a laboratory experiment and propose a theory to address this issue. In a one-shot game, two players, whose social status is either earned or randomly assigned, jointly make effort contributions to a project. Player 1 first suggests their effort levels to player 2 who then determines the actual effort for each player. Deviation from the suggestion is costly. We find causal evidence that high-status players are less selfish than their low-status counterparts. In particular, high-status players 2 are less selfish and deviate less from the suggestion when status is earned than when it is randomly assigned. The experimental results and theoretical framework allow us to conclude that a high social ranking yields more social behavior and that this can be attributed to the sense of responsibility that it gives.

Cooperation among group members is the ultimate pursuit in any collective actions. We examine the collective tasks of approving the use of a reserve fund for maintaining facilities covering approximately 5,000 projects and 635 communities in Nanjing, China. In these communities, any maintenance projects that are covered by the Reserve Fund for Maintenance (RFM) need to be approved by the households. Once the RFM is insufficient to cover, households should be notified about the situation and pay in cash by themselves. We focus on the effect of insufficient RFM on the approval rates of maintenance projects. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1,000 yuan increase in extra cash payment will increase the consent rates of implementing a maintenance plan by approximately 1.04%. Our results suggest that additional information revealed by RFM-uncovered maintenance costs could be a potential mechanism to promote cooperation in making public maintenance decisions by surveying 112 householders involved in the maintenance projects.