What Do We Expect from Our Friends?

• Main Authors: LEIDER, Stephen, MOBIUS, Markus M., ROSENBLAT, Tanya S., DO, Quoc-Anh
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2009
• Subjects: dictator games; beliefs; baseline altruism; directed altruism; social networks; Behavioral Economics; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/1148; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/2147/viewcontent/ExpectFriends.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. Although recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more...