【主讲】梁平汉 副教授 (西南财经大学)
【主题】Love me, Love My Dog: An Experimental Study on Social Connections and Indirect Reciprocity
【时间】2012年11月27日 (周二) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼710室
【语言】英文
【摘要】This paper conducts a laboratory experiment to investigate the underlying behavioral motivations of indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity refers to the situation that upon receiving help from a donor the recipient is willing to repay to a third party. We employ naturally occurring friendship to study social connections, thus, a beneficiary might either be a "friend" or a "stranger" of a donor. We demonstrate that knowing the social connections significantly increase the recipient’s repayment only if the donor is kind enough at the first place. On the other hand, if the donor is allowed send a message to the recipient asking for favorable treatment on the beneficiary, it is shown that the repayment remains the same regardless whether a message is delivered. Major theories of reciprocity, e.g., fairness, intention-based, guilt-aversion, cannot offer satisfactory explanations of our findings. We propose an explanation based on in-group and out-group differences but with endogenous group status, in which social connections play a crucial role.
