Trust and generosity towards local NGOs and peers: Experimental Evidence from urban consumers in five African countries

We run well-established experimental games with urban consumers in five African cities. The aim of the study is to test how standard findings in experimental economics replicate with a non-standard sample and how prosocial attitudes differ when interacting with peers and institutions. Participants play dictator games and trust games with peers or local NGOs as receivers; a public good game, with and without identity manipulation; and two incentivised tasks to elicit risk and time preferences. Preliminary evidence shows larger donations and higher trust towards local NGOs than peers, while identity manipulation does not affect cooperation in the public good game. While average donations and average cooperation levels seem to be in line with the experimental literature, we observe unusually large inconsistencies in risk and time preferences with high variance across cities.