In this issue we feature 10 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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In this issue we have:

1. Everybody's doing it: On the Emergence and Persistence of Bad Social Norms - David Smerdon; Theo Offerman; Uri Gneezy
2. Social capital, perceptions and economic performance - Hernández, José; Guerrero-Luchtenberg, César
3. On Peer Effects: Contagion of Pro- and Anti-Social Behavior in Charitable - Giving and The Role of Social Identity - Eugen Dimant
4. Image Versus Information: Changing Societal Norms and Optimal Privacy - S. Nageeb Ali; Roland Bénabou
5. Social capital, institutions and policymaking - Marco Savioli; Roberto Patuelli
6. The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment - Fabian Kosse; Thomas Deckers; Hannah Schildberg-Horisch; Armin Falk
7. Individualistic Values, Institutional Trust, and Interventionist Attitudes - Hans Pitlik; Martin Rode
8. The Impact of Taxes and Wasteful Government Spending on Giving - Roman M. Sheremeta; Neslihan Uler
9. Can there be a market for cheap-talk information? Some experimental evidence - Cabrales, Antonio; Feri, Francesco; Gottardi, Piero; Meléndez-Jiménez, Miguel A.
10. Intuitive Cooperation and Punishment in the Field - Artavia-Mora, Luis; Bedi, Arjun S.; Rieger, Matthias

 1. Everybody's doing it: On the Emergence and Persistence of Bad Social Norms

    David Smerdon (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

    Theo Offerman (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands)

    Uri Gneezy (UC San Diego, United States)  Social norms permeate society across a wide range of issues and are important  to understanding how societies function. In this paper we concentrate on  'bad' social norms - those that are inefficient or even damaging to a group.

 This paper explains how bad social norms evolve and persist; our theory  proposes a testable model of bad norms based on anecdotal evidence from  real-world examples. We then experimentally test the model and find empirical  support to its main predictions. Central to the model is the role of a  person's social identity in encouraging compliance to a norm. The strength of  this identity is found to have a positive effect on bad norm persistence.

 Additionally, while the size of the social group does not have a long run  effect, smaller groups are more likely to break a bad norm in the short term.

 Furthermore, the results suggest that both anonymous communication and  increasing information about others' payoffs are promising intervention  policies to counter bad norms.

    Keywords: Social norms; Experiment; Identity; Behavioral Economics

    JEL: D03 Z13 C92

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20160023&r=soc

 2. Social capital, perceptions and economic performance

    Hernández, José

    Guerrero-Luchtenberg, César

 This paper describes how social capital emerges, relates to economic  performance and evolves in the long run. Using the concept of psychological  equilibrium, two types of individuals are generated in the population  regarding their willingness to cooperate. We propose an evolutionary

 (learning) process over those types driven by the total payoffs of the  psychological game, and provide a complete description of its dynamics.

 Macro-perceptions, defined as the individual perception of how cooperative  the society is as a whole, are key to explain convergence to the full social  capital state in the long run.

    Keywords: Psychological Equilibrium, Belief-dependent Behavior, Evolutionary Games, Replicator Dynamics, Economic Development.

    JEL: C73 O1

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:71006&r=soc

 3. On Peer Effects: Contagion of Pro- and Anti-Social Behavior in Charitable Giving and The Role of Social Identity

    Eugen Dimant (Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of

     Pennsylvania)

 Social interactions and the resulting peer effects loom large in both  economic and social contexts. This is particularly true for the spillover of

 pro- and anti-social behavior in explaining how such behavior and norms  spread across individual people, neighborhoods, or even cultures. Although we  observe the outcomes of such contagion effects, little is known about the  drivers and the underlying mechanisms, especially with respect to the role of  social identity with one’s peers and the pro- and anti-sociality of behavior  one is exposed to. We use a variant of a power-to-take dictator game to shed  light on these aspects in a controlled laboratory setting. Our experiment  contributes to the existing literature in two ways: first, using a novel  approach of inducing social identification with one’s peers in the lab, our  design allows us to analyze the spillover-effects of behavior under varied  levels of social identity. Second, we study whether pro- and anti-social  behavior are equally contagious. Our results suggest that anti-social  behavior is more contagious than pro-social behavior and that the extent of  social identification to one’s peers particularly drives the contagion of  anti-social behavior. Our findings yield strong policy implications with  regards to designing effective nudges and interventions to facilitate

 (reduce) pro- (anti-) social behavior.

    Keywords: anti-social behavior, behavioral contagion, charitable giving, peer effects, social identity

    JEL: C91 D03 D73 D81

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ppc:wpaper:0006&r=soc

 4. Image Versus Information: Changing Societal Norms and Optimal Privacy

    S. Nageeb Ali

    Roland Bénabou

 We analyze the costs and benefits of using social image to foster virtuous  behavior. A Principal seeks to motivate reputation-conscious agents to supply  a public good. Each agent chooses how much to contribute based on his own mix  of public-spiritedness, private signal about the value of the public good,  and reputational concern for appearing prosocial. By making individual  behavior more visible to the community the Principal can amplify reputational  payoffs, thereby reducing free-riding at low cost. Because societal  preferences constantly evolve, however, she knows only imperfectly both the  social value of the public good (which matters for choosing her own  investment, matching rate or legal policy) and the importance attached by  agents to social esteem and sanctions. Increasing publicity makes it harder  for the Principal to learn from what agents do (the “descriptive norm”) what  they really value (the “prescriptive norm”), thus presenting her with a  tradeoff between incentives and information aggregation. We derive the  optimal degree of privacy/publicity and matching rate, then analyze how they  depend on the economy’s stochastic and informational structure. We show in  particular that in a fast-changing society (greater variability in the  fundamental or the image-motivated component of average preferences), privacy  should generally be greater than in a more static one.

    JEL: D62 D64 D82 H41 K42 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22203&r=soc

 5. Social capital, institutions and policymaking

    Marco Savioli (Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy; The

     Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis, Italy)

    Roberto Patuelli (Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Italy;

     The Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis, Italy)  Economic processes, consisting of interactions between human beings, exploit  the social capital of persons endowed with specific cultures, identities and  education. By taking into account this complexity, we focus on the role of  institutions and policymaking in the building of social capital and its  relevance to the fulfilment of their objectives. Social capital, however, is  elusive and has several dimensions with which to interpret its multifaceted  functions in economics and society. We cannot forget that social capital is  sometimes even undesirable for society, for instance when unethically used.

 Even so, it is widely accepted that social capital has stable and positive  effects.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rim:rimwps:16-10&r=soc

 6. The Formation of Prosociality: Causal Evidence on the Role of Social Environment

    Fabian Kosse (University of Bonn)

    Thomas Deckers (University of Bonn)

    Hannah Schildberg-Horisch (University of Bonn)

    Armin Falk (Universitat Bonn)

 This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social  environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that  socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child  interaction and mothers' prosocial attitudes are systematically related to  elementary school children's prosociality. In a second step, we present  evidence on a randomly assigned variation of the social environment,  providing children with a mentor for the duration of one year. Our data  include a two-year follow-up and reveal a significant and persistent increase  in prosociality in the treatment relative to the control group. Moreover,  enriching the social environment bears the potential to close the observed  developmental gap in prosociality between low and high SES children. Our  findings suggest that the program serves as a substitute for prosocial  stimuli in the family environment.

    Keywords: Formation of preferences, prosociality, social preferences, trust, social inequality

    JEL: D64 C90

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hka:wpaper:2016-011&r=soc

 7. Individualistic Values, Institutional Trust, and Interventionist Attitudes

    Hans Pitlik (WIFO)

    Martin Rode

 Ever since Max Weber (1930) uncovered the cultural origins of capitalism, a  common denominator for explanations of economic development is that  "individualistic values" provide a more favourable background for promoting  the wealth of nations. This paper investigates the impact of individualist  values on personal attitudes towards government intervention, as a potential  link of culture and formal institutions. We consider two key components of an  "individualistic culture" to be particularly relevant for attitude formation,  namely values related to self-direction and self-determination. Results  indicate that both elements of individualistic values are associated  negatively with interventionist preferences. Interestingly, effects of  self-direction values on intervention attitudes are much weaker though, than  the effects of a strong belief in self-determination. Moreover, the effects  of self-direction on intervention preferences are mitigated through higher  trust in state actors and lower confidence in major companies, while that  does not appear to be the case for self-determination values.

    Keywords: individualism, self-direction, self-determination, government intervention, institutional trust, preference formation

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wfo:wpaper:y:2016:i:515&r=soc

 8. The Impact of Taxes and Wasteful Government Spending on Giving

    Roman M. Sheremeta (Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve

     University and Economic Science Institute, Chapman University)

    Neslihan Uler (Institute for Social Research, the University of Michigan)  We examine the impact of taxes and wasteful government spending on charitable  giving. In our model, the government collects a flat-rate tax on income net  of donations and wastes part of the tax revenue before redistribution. The  model provides theoretical predictions which we test in a framed field  experiment. The results of the experiment show that the tax rate has a weak  and insignificant effect on giving. The degree of waste, however, has a  large, negative and significant effect on giving, with the relationship  moderated by the curvature in the utility function.

    Keywords: giving, charity donations, tax, waste, redistribution, experiments

    JEL: C90 D64 H41

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:16-07&r=soc

 9. Can there be a market for cheap-talk information? Some experimental evidence

    Cabrales, Antonio

    Feri, Francesco

    Gottardi, Piero

    Meléndez-Jiménez, Miguel A.

 This paper reports on experiments testing the viability of markets for cheap  talk information. We find that these markets are fragile. The reasons are  surprising given the previous experimental results on cheap-talk games. Our  subjects provide low-quality information even when doing so does not increase  their monetary payoff. We show that this is not because subjects play a  different (babbling) equilibrium. By analyzing subjects' behavior in another  game, we find that those adopting deceptive strategies tend to have envious  or non-pro-social traits. The poor quality of the information transmitted  leads to a collapse of information markets.

    Keywords: Auction; cheap talk; Experiment; Information Acquisition; Information Sale

    JEL: C72 D83 G14

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11206&r=soc

10. Intuitive Cooperation and Punishment in the Field

    Artavia-Mora, Luis (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

    Bedi, Arjun S. (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)

    Rieger, Matthias (ISS, Erasmus University Rotterdam)  We test whether humans are intuitively inclined to cooperate with or punish  strangers using a natural field experiment. We exogenously vary the time  available to help a stranger in an everyday situation. Our findings suggest  that subjects intuitively tend to help but behave more selfishly as thinking  time increases. We also present suggestive evidence that time pressure can  increase rates of punishment. We discuss our results with respect to findings  in the lab on cognitive models of dual-processing and the origins of human  cooperation.

    Keywords: cooperation, punishment, response time, dual-process of cognition, natural field experiment

    JEL: D03 D63 D64

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9871&r=soc

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