In this issue we feature 9 current papers on the theme of social capital:

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1. The effect of news on the radicalization of public opinion towards immigration - Massimiliano Agovino; Maria Rosaria Carillo; Nicola Spagnolo
2. Online Exploration, Content Choice & Echo Chambers: An Experiment - Bar-Gill, Sagit; Gandal, Neil
3. Traits of Negative and Positive Discrimination in the Relationships between Coptic Community and Muslim Authorities of Medieval Egypt - Anastasia M. Ivanova
4. Humans’ (incorrect) distrust of reflective decisions - Antonio Cabrales; Antonio M. Espín; Praveen Kujal; Stephen Rassenti
5. Peer Effects in Employment Status: Evidence from Housing Lotteries for Forced Evacuees in Fukushima - Kondo, Ayako; Shoji, Masahiro
6. The Effect of Shame in Dictator Games with Information Asymmetry - Tomas Miklanek
7. The wisdom of the crowd in funding: : Information heterogeneity and social networks of crowdfunder - F.H.J. Polzin; H.S. Toxopeus; F.C. Stam
8. Seasonal Social Preferences - Ekström, Mathias
9. Consumption and investment in resource pooling family networks - Angelucci, Manuela; De Giorgi, Giacomo; Rasul, Imran

1. The effect of news on the radicalization of public opinion towards immigration

   Massimiliano Agovino

   Maria Rosaria Carillo

   Nicola Spagnolo (-)

 This paper analyses the effects of newspaper coverage and the tone of news on  immigration on the attitude of natives towards immigration in 19 countries  (World Values Survey Database) for the period 2005-2009. The results can be  summarised as follows: coverage and the negative tone of news have a  significant effect in reducing the attitudes towards immigration for people  with high trust in the media; for those with low trust in the media, news on  immigration has no significant effects. In the latter case coverage and the  negative tone of news radicalizes individuals’ prior preferences and  prejudices on immigration, where the latter are proxied by individual  political orientations.

   Keywords: Fuzzy analysis, Immigration, News

   JEL: H89 J15 Z19

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crj:dpaper:1_2016&r=soc

2. Online Exploration, Content Choice & Echo Chambers: An Experiment

   Bar-Gill, Sagit

   Gandal, Neil

 In this experiment, we create an online search environment where users  explore the TED Talks collection, and choose a talk to watch. As users search  in this environment, they can separately control two search dimensions -  topic and popularity. Furthermore, in topic-based searches, we randomly  block/show popularity information. We ask: what types of users are most  likely to get caught in a content echo chamber and what is the role of  popularity information provision in facilitating echo chambers?

 Susceptibility to echo chambers is proxied by: (I) conducting little to no  exploration in the search process, and (II) relying on popularity in content  choice. We find that high levels of sociability and previous experience with  similar content are associated with susceptibility to echo chambers. Opinion  leadership, on the other hand, is associated with more exploration and lower  reliance on popularity. Interestingly, popularity information provision  increases opinion leaders' popularity sorting, and thus raises the potential  for content echo chambers.

   Keywords: content exploration; echo chamber; filter bubble; online search; opinion leadership

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11909&r=soc

3. Traits of Negative and Positive Discrimination in the Relationships between Coptic Community and Muslim Authorities of Medieval Egypt

   Anastasia M. Ivanova (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

 In the course of the Middle ages, the Copts experienced a variety of drastic  changes in the attitude of Muslim rulers towards them, from confidence to  disgrace. The latter included not only the increasingly rigorous tax  policies, but also social and domestic constraints, which can be surely  defined as religious discrimination. Though the Copts managed to regain the  trust of the authorities by their profound skills in administrative and  courtly functions and, of course, compromise in terms of religion, which  allowed them to enjoy high ranks and other benefits of their proximity to the  Egyptian court. This, in its turn, made them an outstanding social group and  can be considered “positive discrimination” in contrast with the definitely  negative discrimination based on confessional conditions. The question of the  balance between positive and negative discrimination as an instrument of  regulating intrastate social cooperation can be crucial for understanding the  specific of these relationships during the described period. So, the main  goal of this work is to trace historical precedents which can be considered  either negative or positive discrimination, and their suppositional influence  on the Copts’ turning into a minority

   Keywords: Egypt, Islam, Middle ages, Copts, religion, Arabic culture, history, islamization

   JEL: Z

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:144/hum/2017&r=soc

4. Humans’ (incorrect) distrust of reflective decisions

   Antonio Cabrales (Department of Economics, University College London)

   Antonio M. Espín (Department of Economics, Middlesex University Business School)

   Praveen Kujal (Department of Economics, Middlesex University and Economic Science Institute, Chapman University)

   Stephen Rassenti (Economic Science Institute, Chapman University)  Recent experiments suggest that social behavior may be shaped by the time  available for decision making. It is known that fast decision making relies  more on intuition whereas slow decision making is affected by reflective  processes. Little is known, however, about whether people correctly  anticipate the effect of intuition vs. reflection on others’ decision making.

 This is important in everyday situations where anticipating others’ behavior  is often essential. A good example of this is the extensively studied Trust  Game where the trustor, by sending an amount of money to the trustee, runs  the risk of being exploited by the trustee’s subsequent action. We use this  game to study how trustors’ choices are affected by whether trustees are  externally forced to respond quickly or slowly. We also examine whether  trustors’ own tendency to stop and reflect on their intuitions (as measured  by the Cognitive Reflection Test) moderates how they anticipate the effect of  reflection on the behavior of trustees. We find that the least reflective  trustors send less money when trustees are forced to respond “reflectively”

 rather than “intuitively”, but we also argue that this is a wrong choice. In  general, no group, including the ones with the largest number of reflective  individuals, is good at anticipating the (positive) effect of forced delay on  others’ trustworthiness

   Keywords: trust, trustworthiness, beliefs, reflection, dual-process,

    intuition

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:chu:wpaper:17-05&r=soc

5. Peer Effects in Employment Status: Evidence from Housing Lotteries for Forced Evacuees in Fukushima

   Kondo, Ayako

   Shoji, Masahiro

 Does a high peer employment rate increase individual employment probability?

 We exploit the random assignment of temporary housing to evacuees from the  Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident to identify the effect of  neighbors’ employment rates on an individual’s probability of finding a job  post-evacuation. Using unique survey data, we find that a one standard  deviation increase in the initial employment rate of an individual’s peers  makes the hazard of restarting work 1.41 times larger during the six months  after move-in. We also show suggestive evidence for social norm to work as an  underlying mechanism for the observed peer effect.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:glodps:23&r=soc

6. The Effect of Shame in Dictator Games with Information Asymmetry

   Tomas Miklanek

 This study introduces a theoretical model of inequality aversion which can  also be used in an environment with information asymmetries. The model is  based on the non-paternalistic approach where, the own utility function  incorporates the utility of other people as perceived by a decision maker.

 Moreover it allows extensions for other motives which may result in  pro-social behavior. I extend the model by adding shame aversion as an  additional driver for apparently altruistic behavior. Threat of shame is  induced by different levels of exposure of either own actions or identity to  the third party observers. I also experimentally test predictions of the  model using a very simple environment of a dictator’s game. The experimental  design aims to remove additional confounding behavioral effects present in  the previous literature. The results suggest that even a very small exposure  results in significantly higher amounts sent to recipients. The analysis also  shows that the agents, who believe that they can conceal their own actions in  front of the less informed counterpart, exploit this information asymmetry  for their monetary benefit.

   Keywords: shame; dictator game; anonymity; experiment;

   JEL: C91 D03

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cer:papers:wp581&r=soc

7. The wisdom of the crowd in funding: : Information heterogeneity and social networks of crowdfunder

   F.H.J. Polzin

   H.S. Toxopeus

   F.C. Stam

 Crowdfunding has enabled large crowds to fund innovative projects. This type  of funding might tap into the wisdom of crowds who were previously  disconnected from the funding process. We distinguish between in-crowd and  out-crowd funders (with and without ties to project creators) in order to  test for heterogeneity in their information use. Based on the analysis of a  large-scale survey amongst project funders, this paper shows that in-crowd  investors rely more on information about the project creator than out-crowd  investors. Out-crowd investors do not seem to attach more importance to  information about the project itself than in-crowd investors, except in the  case of donation-based crowdfunding. For financial-return crowdfunding,  financial information becomes less important once a strong relationship with  the project creator is established. Our study allows project creators to  target information to specific audiences based on their relationship strength  across different types of crowdfunding projects

   Keywords: Crowdfunding, social networks, new ventures, entrepreneurial finance, information asymmetries

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:use:tkiwps:1615&r=soc

8. Seasonal Social Preferences.

   Ekström, Mathias (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)

 Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of  others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year?

 Responding to this question poses a challenge because of the confounding  factors of charitable tax breaks, reciprocity motives, direct social pressure  and persuasive campaigns for giving that are more prevalent in December. In  this paper, I use a unique solicitation situation where these factors are  eliminated. Using nine years of data and more than 50 million individual  giving decisions, I provide three main results. First, the month of December  is associated with an 18 percent increase in the proportion of donors,  thereby providing strong support to the notion of seasonal social  preferences. Second, exploiting a reform that changed the price of giving, I  find that this December effect is equivalent to a 42 percent discount on  charitable giving. Finally, half of the December increase in generosity  persists into January before returning to the baseline in February.

   Keywords: Altruism; Charitable giving; Christmas; Social preferences

   JEL: C33 D03 D64 H41 Z10

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2017_004&r=soc

9. Consumption and investment in resource pooling family networks

   Angelucci, Manuela

   De Giorgi, Giacomo

   Rasul, Imran

 This paper examines a novel motive for resource pooling in family networks in  rural economies: to relax credit constraints and facilitate investment in  non-collateralizeable assets for which credit market imperfections are most  binding. We thus complement established literature examining risk-sharing  motives for resource transfers within family networks, as well as motives  based on kinship tax obligations. We do so exploiting the Progresa program  data, in which family networks can be identified, households are subject to  large exogenous resource inflows, and detailed responses on consumption and  an array of investments can be tracked in a household panel over five years.

 We find that for every dollar that accrues to the family network through  Progresa transfers, food consumption expenditures increase by around 65c for  both households eligible for Progresa and ineligible members of the same  family network. Hence the marginal propensity of families to invest/save out  of every dollar is around .35, and we document how this is channeled towards  easing credit constraints poorer network members face in financing  non-collateralizable investments into their children's human capital. We show  these consumption and investment benefits of being embedded within a family  network are sustained five years after households first experience resource  transfers from Progresa. Hence the interplay between resource inflows and  resource pooling by family networks can place network members on sustained  paths out of poverty.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11889&r=soc

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