Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature

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

Table 1.         Network Elicitation Device.

Once the network is obtained, MRQ check whether subjects are will-
ing to increase their donation (in dictator games) when they are
matched with a friend as recipient. Thus, the key difference between
their work and previous dictator game literature is that they “control”
the matching process (i. e. social proximity) with precise information
on the previously elicited network. Given that they can measure the
distance between subjects, they control donations by the existing out-
standing relation between them. MRQ study whether a subject’s
behavior changes when he/she faces a friend as recipient, that is, when
the level of social distance (between players) is reduced to the mini-
mum. This is precisely the opposite case to Hoffman et al. 1994, 1996,
where the individual has no information about the recipient and thus
the social distance is maximum. The result is clear:

R1: Social proximity (being matched to a friend instead of a stranger)
increases giving.

To be more precise, in one of their treatments MRQ’s subjects are
informed that they will be matched to a specific friend (see Table 2).
From the whole set of i’s friends, F_i, he/she will play with a precise
element of the set, j. In what follows, we denote by p_i(f ) the probabil-
ity of i being matched to an element in F_i and by p_i(j) the probability
of being matched to a specific element. Under this experimental de-
sign, dictators know their recipients’ identity and typically, they also
have information about personal characteristics (for instance, their
income, their needs, etc.) that may affect social proximity.

MRQ also deal with the topic of social integration. They define a clus-
tering-related measure (named strength ) based on connected friends: it
is an index which captures the number of friends that two individuals
share. Concerning social integration they obtain a second crucial result:

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