Search

This paper studies the causal impact of social ties and network structure on helping behavior in organizations. We introduce and experimentally study a game called the 'helping game,' where individuals unilaterally decide whether to incur a cost to help other team members when helping is a rivalrous good. We find that social ties have a strong positive effect on helping behavior. Individuals are more likely to help those with whom they are connected, but the likelihood of helping decreases as the social distance between individuals increases. Additionally, individuals who are randomly assigned to be more central in the network are more likely to help others.

Some transactions are restricted or prohibited, although people may want to engage in them (e.g., the sale of human organs, surrogacy, and prostitution). It is not well understood what causes the judgement of repugnance. We study two potential reasons: lack of agency of the parties and extreme consequences of the transaction. Limited agency arises, e.g., when one party cannot decide freely because she is not able to reject the transaction offered, a third person who profits from the transaction takes the decision on her behalf, or she is forced to proceed with the transaction due to social pressure. In a laboratory experiment, we ask spectators whether they want to prohibit a transaction or not. We find that transactions with extreme outcomes (listening to a painful tone) are more frequently prohibited than those with mild outcomes (waiting in the laboratory). We also show that lack of agency and extreme outcomes reinforce each other, since the combination of both properties leads to prohibition rates of up to 80 percent.

In der Corona-Krise sind neue Verhaltensweisen in der Gesellschaft wichtig. Soziale Normen können je nach Ausprägung die Umsetzung behindern oder unterstützen.

Working hard is costly, so people should work wisely. Yet, they do not always work efficiently, spending their effort on tasks that do not bring tangible benefits. One reason that potentially amplifies inefficient working is that people work in social environments where they are observed and where others' earnings also depend on their effort. In this paper, we investigate whether people work and earn more than they need, and if so why? We use laboratory experiments to disentangle two concerns that potentially lead people to work inefficiently hard, namely image concerns and prosocial motives. Our results suggest that people indeed overwork unnecessarily, and that this is mainly due to image concerns.

Experimental research on generosity has focused predominantly on behavior in the monetary domain, although many real life decisions take place in the non-monetary domain. Investigating generosity preferences in the non-monetary domain is important to understand a large class of situations ranging from effort provision at work to individual CO2 emissions. This study explores whether generosity differs between the monetary and non-monetary domains and if so why. The results show that preferences for generosity are different between domains and that different social norms of allocation can explain the greater levels of generosity in the non-monetary compared to the monetary domain.

We investigate social norms for dictator game giving using a recently proposed norm-elicitation procedure (Krupka and Weber, 2013). We elicit norms separately from dictator, recipient, and disinterested third party respondents and find that elicited norms are stable and insensitive to the role of the respondent. The results support the use of this procedure as a method for measuring social norms.