Economic Working Papers at Centro de Estudios Andaluces
Resumen
We study whether people's behavior in a one-shot sequential public goods type situation is affected by social information about average behavior by others in the same situation. The kind of social information we consider does not directly affect subjects' payoffs and we are, therefore, able to separate pure social influence from more conventional distributional effects. We find clear evidence for other-regarding preferences; a specific patterns that we identify is that the more generous a subject, the more reciprocal his responses to others' actions. However, there is very little indication of social influence in our data. The results suggest that current static models of social preferences need not take into account the effect of social influence.
