Question for Eleanor Power's Talk on "Generosity and Reputational Concern Across Cultures: Networked Dictator Games in Five Countries"

[xqrue-49]

Question for Eleanor Power's Talk on "Generosity and Reputational Concern Across Cultures: Networked Dictator Games in Five Countries"

Generosity and Reputational Concern Across Cultures: Networked Dictator Games in Five Countries. We conduct experimental economic games to study how reputational stake influences people’s decision-making. Players make a series of “Dictator Game” decisions, splitting an endowment between themselves and a recipient. Crucially, recipients are not anonymous strangers but are other community members, presented via photo on a custom Android app. By varying the identity of the recipient and whether they will come to know the identity of the donor, we effectively vary the reputational exposure of the donor's decision. We expect that players will be more generous when their decisions have greater reputational stake. This greater reputational stake could come from: the revelation of the donor's identity, the social proximity of donor and recipient, and their respective network positions. We conduct these games in seven rural communities in five countries (India, Colombia, Nepal, Morocco, and Mexico), where we already have full sociodemographic and social network data. This entails (so far) almost 1400 players and almost 40,000 allocation decisions.

While there is substantial cross-site variation in the average amount given (implying different cultural norms), we find strikingly similar effects of social proximity and revelation across sites. Donors give more of their endowment to friends or friends-of-friends, as opposed to more distant recipients. We further find a small but consistent effect of revelation on Dictator Game allocations: donors give more of their endowment when their identity is revealed, as opposed to being kept anonymous. There is greater heterogeneity in how revelation interacts with social proximity and the network position of donor and recipient, the implications of which we discuss.

Reading List

• Iyer, P., Deschenaux, I., Ross, C., Alami, S., Seabright, E., Hertzog, W., Chauhan, K., & Power, E. A. (n.d.). Reputational concern across cultures. (Unpublished Manuscript, see email attachment)
• Bursztyn, L., & Jensen, R. (2017). Social image and economic behavior in the field: Identifying, understanding, and shaping social pressure. Annual Review of Economics, 9(1), 131–153. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-063016-103625
• Dumas, M., Barker, J. L., & Power, E. A. (2021). When does reputation lie? Dynamic feedbacks between costly signals, social capital and social prominence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1838), 20200298. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0298

[Adrianne-Li]

In your cross-country networked dictator games, you find consistent effects of social proximity and identity revelation on generosity despite cultural variation in baseline giving. How do you interpret this relative invariance? Could it reflect universal social mechanisms (e.g., signaling theory, indirect reciprocity), or is it possibly a methodological artifact of the game structure? What additional experimental variations might help tease apart these explanations?

[zcyou018]

Thank you for sharing! You mention that one goal is to analyze how generosity in the game influences donors’ reputations afterward. Do you have preliminary insights on whether generous donors are actually perceived more positively post-game, and whether this perception varies by the recipient's centrality or proximity?

[dario-marino]

Thanks for sharing! How did you control for different levels of wealth? Also how much these rural communities perceive this game as something local and would it change if other strategic preferences were introduced?

[yixin-0720]

Thank you for sharing. In your cross-cultural Dictator Game experiments, how do you disentangle the effect of reputational concern from broader cultural norms around giving, reciprocity, or obligation? For instance, in communities where reciprocal exchange is deeply embedded in everyday life, do participants interpret and respond to these games differently compared to those in societies with more individualistic norms? And how do you ensure that your measure of “generosity” is capturing comparable behaviors across these diverse settings?

[PENGRUISU]

Thank you for your sharing! Your cross-cultural findings show remarkably consistent effects of social proximity and identity revelation on generosity across diverse sites. Given that network structures and reputational stakes likely operate differently in small-scale rural communities versus large urban settings, how do you anticipate these patterns might change if the study were replicated in urban populations with more fluid social networks? Are there plans to explore such contexts?

[saniazeb8]

Thank you for sharing. I am curious to know what happens to our sense of generosity when we’re not giving anonymously, but face to face when the person receiving knows us, maybe even lives in our village, and might recognize our choice as kind or selfish. Do we give more when the social spotlight is on us, when our decision could shape how others see us, or how we see ourselves? And does this change depending on whether the person we’re giving to is a close friend, a neighbor, or just someone in the wider community?

[QIXIN-LIN]

Thanks for sharing! Given your findings on how reputational concerns shape generosity within community networks, how might similar dynamics play out in workplace settings, especially in gig or informal labor markets where social ties and visibility can vary significantly? Do you think reputational exposure among peers or clients could influence labor behaviors such as collaboration, effort, or wage negotiation?

[Mengyang-Cao]

Thanks for sharing! Did you find that donors with higher social centrality gave more in the dictator game, possibly to protect or enhance their reputations?

[Kevin2330]

Thank you for sharing your research.

You found that people give more when their identity is revealed and when the recipient is socially closer. But these effects sometimes interact in different ways across sites. What do you think explains those differences—are they more about culture or how the social networks are structured?

[yunfeiavawang]

Thanks for sharing! Your study finds that donors give more when their identity is revealed and to those with greater social proximity, suggesting that generosity is shaped by reputational concern. However, the interaction effects between revelation, social proximity, and network position vary across sites. Given the cross-cultural nature of your study, how do you interpret these variations? Do they suggest that different societies place different weights on reputation-based generosity, or could they reflect variations in social network structures (e.g., density, hierarchy, reciprocity norms) influencing the reputational payoff of generosity?

[Jessieliao2001]

Thanks for your sharing! My question is How might the cross-cultural findings on generosity—where reputational exposure and social proximity significantly increase cooperative allocations—inform our understanding of the role of social capital and trust in fostering macroeconomic growth and development?

[Weiranz926]

Thanks for sharing！Did you observe any gender differences in how reputational concerns influence generosity across the different cultural settings, especially in interaction with social proximity or identity revelation?

[ZW-PaulWang]

Thanks for sharing! How does the interaction between signal success rates and varying levels of social prominence influence the stability and duration of reputational shields in dynamic signalling models? How do initial disparities in social prominence influence price differentials for comparable products and contribute to persistent market inequality?

[hailhan]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I'm curious how these dynamics might change in real-world virtual giving spaces (like GoFundMe). Would the expansion of the giving network lead to less generosity, or would the knowledge of the recipient's identity (at least what they provide in their description) and choice to be an anonymous/known donor lead to more giving?

[AnqiW02]

Thanks for sharing this insightful research! Your study highlights robust cross-cultural patterns in generosity tied to social proximity and identity revelation, even amid significant variation in baseline giving norms. What do these findings suggest about the universality of reputational mechanisms in human cooperation? Additionally, given the observed variability in how network centrality modulates reputational effects, what practical or ethical considerations arise when designing community-level interventions that rely on social exposure to encourage prosocial behavior?