NEP: New Economics Papers - Social Norms and Social Capital - 2014-04-11

Date:

2013-06

By:

Andrea Tesei
Paolo Pinotti (Università Bocconi)
Ruben Durante (Département d'économie)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpmain:info:hdl:2441/7o52iohb7k6srk09n8t4pad92&r=soc [3]

We investigate the long-term impact of early exposure to Berlusconi’s commercial TV network, Mediaset, on voting behavior and civic engagement in Italy. To do so, we exploit differences in Mediaset signal reception across Italian municipalities due to the network’s staggered introduction over the national territory and to idiosyncratic geomorphological factors. We find that municipalities exposed to Mediaset prior to 1985 exhibit greater electoral support for Berlusconi’s party in 1994, when he first ran for office, relative to municipalities that were exposed only later on. This difference, estimated between 1 and 2 percentage points, is extremely robust and tends to persist in the following four elections. This effect can hardly be attributed to differential exposure to partisan news bias since, prior to 1985, content on Mediaset channels was dominated by light-entertainment programs and no news programs were broadcast until 1991, by which time the network was accessible to the entire population. Instead, we present evidence that early exposure to commercial TV was associated with a substantial decline in social capital consistent with the diffusion of a culture of individualism and civic disengagement that favored the political success of Berlusconi.

Keywords:

mass media, voting, civic engagement

JEL:

L82 D72 Z13

Date:

2014-04-01

By:

Bjornskov, Christian
Bogetic, Zeljko
Hillman, Arye L.
Popovic, Milenko

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6828&r=soc [4]

The principal focus in the substantial literature on impediments to economic development has been on the inadequacies of policies and governance. However, successful economic development requires effectiveness of markets and incentives for investment, which in turn require trust. This paper reports on trust in a development context. The paper uses trust experiments, a post-experiment survey, and econometric analysis relating trust to identity and other personal attributes in the setting of Montenegro, a small, recently-independent, post-socialist, post-crisis society. External validity was sought by providing sufficient material reward to balance identity-related expressive motives and by having two groups of subjects, one usual university students and another group that, while also students, was somewhat older and had had greater market or commercial experience. The paper reviews cultural priors that can be expected to affect trust and distinguishes between generalized trust that can be socially beneficial and particularized trust that can be disadvantageous for development. The empirical results suggest that trust among private individuals is not an impediment to development in Montenegro. As a result, policy reform can improve economic and social outcomes. However, the results redirect the focus to issues of governance and political entrenchment as potential explanations for impediments to development.

Keywords:

Post Conflict Reconstruction,Social Capital,Political Economy,Ethics&Belief Systems,Business Ethics, Leadership and Values

Date:

2014-03

By:

Francis Bloch (EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris)
Gabrielle Demange (EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris, PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS : UMR8545 - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC) - École normale supérieure [ENS] - Paris - Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA))
Rachel Kranton (EEP-PSE - Ecole d'Économie de Paris - Paris School of Economics - Ecole d'Économie de Paris, PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - CNRS : UMR8545 - École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) - École des Ponts ParisTech (ENPC) - École normale supérieure [ENS] - Paris - Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA))

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:psewpa:halshs-00966234&r=soc [5]

Why do people spread rumors? This paper studies the transmission of possibly false information---by rational agents who seek the truth. Unbiased agents earn payoffs when a collective decision is correct in that it matches the true state of the world, which is initially unknown. One agent learns the underlying state and chooses whether to send a true or false message to her friends and neighbors who then decide whether or not to transmit it further. The papers hows how a social network can serve as a filter. Agents block messages from parts of the network that contain many biased agents; the messages that circulate may be incorrect but sufficiently informative as to the correct decision.

Keywords:

Bayesian updating ; Rumors ; Misinformation ; Social networks

Date:

2014

By:

Alin Halimatussadiah
Budy P. Resosudarmo
Diah Widyawati

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pas:papers:2014-03&r=soc [6]

Social capital is considered to be an important factor in economic development. It is argued that it generates a flow of (economic) benefits through collective action, by reducing free riding and increasing individual contribution. This study examines whether social capital increases individual contribution in a collective action situation. Using a classroom experiment, two games are played in a sequential manner: a trust game to measure level of trust–as a proxy for social capital–and a public goods game to measure individual contribution to collective action. In the public goods game, we apply some treatments to look at the impact of partial disclosure of a group member’s behaviour in the trust game on contributions in the public goods game. In general, the result shows that the level of social capital positively impacts individual contribution to collective action. However, we found no significant evidence to support the impact of partial disclosure of a group member's behaviour in the trust game on contributions in the public goods game.

Keywords:

Social Capital, Collective Action, Trust Game, Public Goods Game

JEL:

A14 C91 C92

Date:

2014

By:

Oleg Poldin (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
Diliara Valeeva (National Research University Higher School of Economics)
Maria Yudkevich (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:37/soc/2014&r=soc [7]

We analyze the characteristics of the social networks of students studying in the economics department in one Russian university. We focus on student friendship and study assistance ties and demonstrate how these networks are connected with the individual characteristics of students and their peers. We find that the probability of a tie existing is explained by the gender homophily, and initial student assignment to the same exogenously defined study group. Students ask for help and form friendships with students who have similar academic achievements. Academically successful students are more popular in study assistance networks while there is no gender difference in student popularity in both networks. Our findings enhance the understanding of the role of friendship and study assistance ties in the formation of peer group effects

Keywords:

student achievement, social networks, peer group effects, higher education

JEL:

D85 I21 I23

Date:

2013

By:

Visser, Martine (SALDRU, School of Economics, University of Cape Town)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ldr:wpaper:116&r=soc [8]

We examine behavioural models involved in the provision of public goods when income inequality exists within groups. Our sample consists of individuals from urban and rural South African fishing communities. We find that behaviour observed in unequal groups does not accord with models of inequality aversion or egocentric altruism which require an equal distribution of final payoffs. On the other hand it is also not the case that individuals completely discount differences in initial allocations of wealth, as proposed by our absolute reciprocity model. Instead our empirical results lends support to a reciprocal model which requires that individuals contribute a proportional share of their initial endowments. Accordingly individuals are only partly held responsible for exogenous differences in initial wealth.

Keywords:

Social Norms; Inequality Aversion; Altruism; Reciprocity; Public goods; National Income Dynamics Study

JEL:

C9 C72 D63 D64 H41 Z13

Date:

2014-02

By:

Masahiro Shoji (Faculty of Economics, Seijo University)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tky:fseres:2014cf923&r=soc [9]

This study empirically disentangles the channels of peer effects in crime through an experiment conducted in rural Bangladesh. The first part of this study assumes that individuals exhibit guilt aversion, which predicts the peer effects via guilt sensitivity and belief. By incorporating peer effects in a take-away game, the criminal player is informed about the victim player's belief only in the treatment group, so that the peer effects in the treatment group are driven only through guilt sensitivity. The experime ntal results suggest that peer effects affect and bring about changes in belief. The second part elicits guilt sensitivity to test guilt aversion. I find robust supporting evidence for my results, and reject the alternatives such as pure altruism and trustw orthiness. Finally, external validity is also confirmed: the criminal behaviour of subjects in the experiment is correlated with their attitude towards illegal activities in the real wo rld, and individuals are less likely to suffer from property crime in villages with a higher guilt sensitivity neighbourhood.

Date:

2013-03

By:

Quoc-Anh Do (Département d'économie)
Kieu-Trang Nguyen (London School of Economics)
Anh N. Tran (Indiana University Bloomington)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:spo:wpecon:info:hdl:2441/6ggbvnr6munghes9ocpp7f52o&r=soc [10]

Although patronage politics in democracies has been studied extensively, it is less understood in undemocratic regimes, where a large proportion of the world's population resides. To fill this gap, our paper studies how government officials in authoritarian Vietnam direct public resources toward their hometowns. We manually collect an exhaustive panel dataset of political promotions of officials from 2000 to 2010 and estimate their impact on public infrastructure in their rural hometowns. We obtain three main results. First, promotions of officials improve a wide range of infrastructure in their hometowns, including roads, markets, schools, radio stations, clean water and irrigation. This favoritism is pervasive among officials across different ranks, even among those without budget authority, suggesting informal channels of influence. Second, in contrast to pork-barrel politics in democratic parliaments, elected legislators have no power to exercise favoritism. Third, only home communes receive favors, while larger and more politically important home districts do not. This suggests that favoritism is likely motivated by officials’ social preferences for their hometowns rather than by political considerations.

Date:

2014-04

By:

Berno Buechel
Lydia Mechtenberg
Julia Petersen

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hum:wpaper:sfb649dp2014-024&r=soc [11]

We conducted a multi-wave field experiment to study the interaction of peer effects and selfcontrol among undergraduate students. We use a behavioral measure of self-control based on whether students achieve study related goals they have set for themselves. We find that both self-control and the number of talented friends increase students’ performance. We then set out to test the theoretical prediction of Battaglini, Bénabou and Tirole (2005) that (only) sufficiently self-controlled individuals profit from interactions with peers. We find that peers with high self-control are more likely to connect to others, have a higher overall number of friends and have a higher number of talented friends. Moreover, positive news about self-controlled behavior of their peers increases students’ own perseverance. Hence, our findings are consistent with the model of Battaglini, Bénabou and Tirole. In addition, we find that female students are more likely to have high self-control, but do not outperform male students. One reason for this is that female students have a lower number of talented friends than their male counterparts, thereby profiting less from positive peer effects.

Keywords:

Self-control, Peer Influence, Social Networks, Goals, Time preferences, Procrastination, Willpower, School Performance, Experiment

JEL:

C93 D85 I21 J24

Date:

2014-04

By:

Alexey Kushnir
Alexandru Nichifor

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zur:econwp:152&r=soc [12]

We introduce a simple two-stage game of endogenous network formation and information sharing for reasoning about the optimal design of social networks like Facebook or Google+. We distinguish between unilateral and bilateral connections and between targeted and collective information sharing. Agents value being connected to other agents and sharing and receiving information. We consider multiple utility specifications. We show that the game always has an equilibrium in pure strategies and then we study how the network design and the utility specifications affect welfare. Surprisingly, we find that in general, targeted information sharing is not necessarily better than collective information sharing. However, if all agents are either "babblers" or "friends", irrespective of whether the network is unilateral or bilateral, in equilibrium, targeted information sharing yields higher welfare than collective information sharing.

Keywords:

Networks, network formation, unilateral connections, bilateral connections, targeted information sharing, collective information sharing, Google, Facebook, babblers, friends

JEL:

D85 C72 C62

Date:

2014

By:

Haucap, Justus
Müller, Andrea

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:dicedp:136&r=soc [13]

We analyze the behavior of 577 economics and law students in a simple binary trust experiment. While economists are both significantly less trusting and less trustworthy than law students, this difference is largely due to differences between female law and economics students. While female law students are already different in nature (during the first term of study) from female economists, the gap between them also widens more drastically over the course of their study compared to their male counterparts. This finding is rather critical as the detailed composition of students is typically neglected in most experiments. --

Keywords:

Gender Effects,Trust Game,Economists,Nature,Nurture

JEL:

A12 A22 C35 C91

Date:

2014-04

By:

Olivier N. Godart
Holger Görg
Aoife Hanley

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:kie:kieliw:1913&r=soc [14]

We explore whether the introduction of trust based working hours is related to the subsequent innovation performance of firms. Employing a panel data set of over 5,000 German establishments, we implement a propensity score matching approach where we only consider firms that did not use trust based work contracts initially. Our results show that firms which adopt such contracts tend to be between 11 to 14 percent more likely to improve products. These results hold when we control for another form of flexible time work arrangements, namely working time accounts. Thus, the positive relationship between the adoption of trust based working hours and innovation seems to be driven by the degree of control and self-management over working days, rather than by merely allowing time flexibility

Keywords:

Trust based work time, innovation, firm performance

JEL:

M1 M5 L2

Date:

2014-03-31

By:

Robert Böhm (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Gary Bornstein (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Hannes Koppel (Heidelberg University, Germany)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2014-011&r=soc [15]

We investigate experimentally the underlying motivations and individual dierences with regard to the participation in between-group conflict in nested social dilemmas. In our nested social dilemmas, the collective is divided into two groups, and individuals allocate tokens between a private, a group-specific, and a collective good. We vary the marginal per capita return of the group-specific and collective good in order to manipulate the motivational within- and between group conflicts. A first experiment shows that a between-group conflict leads to within-group cooperation and particularly individuals with positive other-regarding preferences (prosocials) react to a between-group conflict by contributing to the group-specific good. Hence, paradoxically, individuals with positive other-regarding preferences may foster between-group conflicts. A second experiment reveals that prosocials' contributions to the group-specific or collective good vary as a function of the personal costs of within-group versus collective cooperation, supporting the weighted average social preference theory by Charness and Rabin (2002).

Keywords:

between-group conflict, nested social dilemma, other-regarding preferences, local and global public goods

JEL:

C72 C92 H41

Date:

2014-03

By:

Dr. Terry Najja Kakeeto-Aelen (Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands)
Professor Jan C van Dalen (Maastricht School of Management, The Netherlands)
Professor H. Jaap van den Herik (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
Dr. Bartel A. Van de Walle (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)

URL:

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:msm:wpaper:2014/06&r=soc [16]

In the marketing arena, the last two decades have been characterised by increased attention towards the subject of Relationship Marketing (RM). Both academics and practitioners today increasingly recognize RM as one of the main marketing strategies that is necessary to keep companies visible and competitive in the eyes of their customers. However, what we observe is that inspite of increased interest in the subject, we know quite little, from an empirical perspective, about the manner in which Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), especially those in developing countries, use RM to build and enhance long-term relationships with their customers and thus remain competitive. The purpose of this article is to examine the role of customer satisfaction, trust and commitment in the formation and enhancement of long-term customer relationships among SMEs in the service sector in Uganda and to suggest practical tools that policy makers in developing countries can use to enhance SME competitiveness. We obtained the required data for the study from SME owner-managers, customers, and frontline employees of SMEs operating in two service sectors in Uganda, namely the restaurant sector and the travel-agency sector. Our findings indicate that customer satisfaction, trust and commitment all play a significant role in the building and enhancement of long-term customer relationships among SMEs in Uganda. However, their role varies between different SME sectors. The findings also show that in general, those SMEs whose RM practices customers were more satisfied with had higher levels of customer loyalty compared to those SMEs whose RM practices customers were less satisfied with. This study has increased our awareness about the processes that SMEs in developing countries go through to build customer loyalty and thus long-term competitiveness. In this way, the study has helped to narrow the gap in current literature about the RM practices of SMEs in developing countries.

Keywords:

Relationship Marketing, SMEs, Customer Satisfaction, Trust, Commitment, Customer Loyalty