Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature

Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature

Pablo Branas-Garza y Maria Paz Espinosa

(see Hoffman et al., 1996). Recently, there has been a stream of papers
seeking a complementary result (that which relates social integration
with greater altruism). To our knowledge, there are very few papers
focussing on the link between latent⁴ social networks and altruism⁵.

As we will show in this section, there are two key ingredients in this
literature: the network elicitation procedures and the matching proc-
ess between subjects. The latter is controlled in order to explore so-
cial issues: integration, friendship, favoritism, etc.

Let us introduce some concepts.

Definition 1 (F_i) Network of friends is the set ({F_i}_i∈N, N). In words,
each participant i declares who his/her friends are within the set N.
We denote by F_i the set of friends and by f_i = |F_i| the number of friends.
The members of N not in F_i will be called strangers⁶ for i; the set of
strangers for i is thus: S_i = N \ F_i.

Example 1 F1 = {2, 3}, F2 = {1}, F3 = {1, 4}, F4 = {3}, F5 = φ, F6 = {2, 3}.

Figure 1 represents this network.

Two additional definitions will be useful: the first connects the exist-
ing literature on the dictator game with this new literature⁷ and the
second is based on network measures.

⁴ These experiments do not create or promote social networks between participants; they
just elicit the social network existing prior to the experiment.

⁵ We do not include here designs of the “come to the lab with your friend” type (see Reuben,
2006 for an extensive discussion). Observe that these designs do not elicit a complete
network.

⁶ Note that S_i contains the set of friends of i’s friends not in F_i, or more precisely the set of
k > 1 neighbors for i, while F_i includes all k = 1 neighbors. In many cases, k = 2 for
instance, these neighbors are not strangers at all (see Vega-Redondo, 2005).

⁷ See Dufwemberg and Muren (2006) for a discussion.

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