Altruism with Social Roots: An Emerging Literature

DESARROLLO Y SO

SEGUNDO SEMESTRE DE 2006, PP. 245-260.

R2: Social integration (as measured by the strength of the link) in-
creases generosity.

In sum, MRQ show that the greater the social integration and the
greater the social proximity, the greater the level of donations.

Table 2.

Matched to a friend.

Given MRQ’s matching mechanism there are two other variables
mixed with social proximity and social integration that could be driv-
ing the results. First, the design does not enable a distinction to be
made as to whether subjects give more because the recipient is a close
friend or simply because they know the recipient’s identity and his/
her personal characteristics. Note in this respect that very recent
literature shows that dictator giving is extremely sensitive to informa-
tion regarding the recipient’s identity (see Charness and Gneezy⁹ or
Frohlich etal., 2001) and his/her attributes (see Branas-Garza, 2006).
Second, since dictators know the recipient’s identity, there is room for
reciprocity: players could obtain ex-post benefits from their dona-
tions (see Rabin, 1993).

Branas-Garza, Duran andEspinosa (2005) (BDE) partially solve these
problems regarding the information about the recipient. To obtain F_i
for each player i, subjects are asked (using a different elicitation de-
vice¹⁰, see Table 1) for a list of their close friends. Once the whole
social network is obtained each subject is matched to a friend -as in

⁹ Charness and Gneezy (forthcoming). “What’s in a name? Anonymity and social distance in
dictator and ultimatum games”, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.

¹⁰ The benefit-your-friend incentive device: subjects were asked to write down the name of
their classmate friends who “may have the chance to benefit later in the experiment”. No
information was provided about the type of decisions they would make afterwards. The
instructions clearly stated that they might be given the chance to benefit only one of their
friends (randomly chosen) so that the more friends they listed, the lower the chance of
benefiting any particular individual was.

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