Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature

Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature
Pablo Branas-Garza y Maria Paz Espinosa

Resumen

En este articulo se analiza la Iiteratura reciente sobre los déterminantes
del altruismo en el marco de una red social. Se proponen dos variables
explicativas para racionalizar resultados experimentales relativos al
denominado efecto amistad. La primera de ellas es la integration so-
cial, que tiene un impacto positivo sobre la generosidad. La segunda
variable es estratégica y esta basada en la reciprocidad: la posibilidad
de recibir favores ex.post. El analisis econométrico que realizamos
muestra que las dos variables tienen un efecto positivo y significativo.

Palabras clave: donaciones, redes sociales, reciprocidad, integracion
social.

Clasificacion JEL : C91, D64, Z13.

Introduction

The role of socialization in altruistic behavior is a growing topic in
experimental literature. Seminal papers in this field (Hoffman et al.,
1996 and Hoffman et al., 1994 or Bohnet and Frey, 1999) explore the
effect of “social distance” on giving, i.e. how the subjects’ perception
of the recipient as close or distant, in moral terms, affects the outcome;
the result is that proximity plays a crucial role in explaining generosity.
Although the first papers on this issue interpreted this social aspect as a
matter of framing, a number of subsequent papers have dealt with pure
social issues focussing on the attributes of recipients.

This literature started with Eckel and Grossman (1996), who analyzed
how individuals behave when the recipient is a well-known and re-
puted institution: the Red Cross. This line of research regarding the
recipient’s identity continued with Burham (2003), who endow dicta-
tors with pictures of the recipients, Charness and Gneezy¹, who give
recipients’ names to proposers, and Branas-Garza (2006), who inform

¹ Charness and Gneezy (forthcoming). “What’s in a name? Anonymity and social distance in
dictator and ultimatum games”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

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