Reputational Concern Across Cultures

We conduct experimental economic games designed to study how reputational concern influences people's economic decisions. Donors make a series of ``Dictator Game'' decisions, splitting an endowment between themselves and a recipient. Crucially, recipients are not anonymous strangers, but are other individuals from the same community as the donor, presented to donors via photographs. By varying the identity of the recipient and whether or not the recipient will come to know the identity of the donor, we can effectively vary the reputational stake of the donor's decision. We expect that when Dictator Game allocation decisions have greater reputational stakes, donors will be more generous.Greater reputational stakes could arise from: the revelation of the donor's identity, the social proximity of donor and recipient, and the general network position of donor and recipient, all of which we consider. We conduct these games in eight rural communities in five countries, where we already have full sociodemographic and social network data on players and their connections. While there is substantial cross-site variation in the amounts given, we find strikingly similar effects of revelation and social proximity on allocation decisions: in all sites, donors give only slightly more in contexts where their identity is revealed, as opposed to being kept anonymous. Whether anonymous or revealed, donors give appreciably less to recipients who are more socially distant, with the largest drop occurring between immediate connections and connections-of-connections. We find mixed evidence that the effect of revealing a donor's identity diminishes with social distance. Finally, we do not find clear effects for the network position of donor and recipient. These results improve our understanding of how economic behaviour is intertwined with reputational dynamics in a wide variety of contexts. While altruistic behaviour does increase with reputational concern cross-culturally, it also appears that in tight-knit, small communities, absence of reputational concern may, contra expectations, lead only to a small increase in selfishness.