In this issue we feature 13 current papers on the theme of social capital, chosen by Fabio Sabatini (Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”):

Access to full contents may be restricted. To subscribe/unsubscribe follow this link: http://lists.repec.org/mailman/options.

1. Where do fairness preferences come from? Norm transmission in a teen friendship network - David Hugh-Jones; Jinnie Ool
2. Tax morale and the role of social norms and reciprocity: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment - Doerrenberg, Philipp; Peichl, Andreas
3. Civic capital and support for the welfare state - Cerqueti, Roy; Sabatini, Fabio; Ventura, Marco
4. Urban Interactions - Kim, Jun Sung; Patacchini, Eleonora; Picard, Pierre M; Zenou, Yves
5. Deviant or Wrong? The Effects of Norm Information on the Efficacy of Punishment - Cristina Bicchieri; Eugen Dimant; Erte Xiao
6. Tax Morale and Policy Intervention - Nordblom, Katarina
7. Internet and Politics: Evidence from U.K. Local Elections and Local Government Policies - Alessandro Gavazza; Mattia Nardotto; Tommaso M. Valletti
8. The Impact of Social Media On Belief Formation - Schwarz, Marco A.
9. Humans reciprocate intentional harm by discriminating against group peers - David Hugh-Jones; Itay Ron; Ro'i Zultan
10. Cooperation and Punishment: The Individual-Level Perspective - Felix Albrecht; Sebastian Kube; Christian Traxler
11. Peer sanctioning in isomorphic provision and appropriation social dilemmas - Abhijit Ramalingam; Antonio J. Morales; James M. Walker
12. Giving in dictator games: Experimenter demand effect or preference over the rules of the game? Nadine Chlass; Peter G. Moffatt
13. The role of morals in three-player ultimatum games - Sandro Casal; Francesco Fallucchi; Simone Quercia

 1. Where do fairness preferences come from? Norm transmission in a teen friendship network

    David Hugh-Jones (University of East Anglia)

    Jinnie Ool (University of East Anglia)  People's preferences about the fair distribution of resources vary within and  between different populations, and this affects many economic and political  outcomes. We argue that a source of these differences is the social  transmission of fairness norms from peers during adolescence. We ran an  experiment on transmission of fairness norms in a friendship network of 11-15  year olds. Observing others' choices affects young people's fairness norms,  as expressed in both their own choices and the attitudes they express. Our  results show how young people can adopt redistributive norms via the social  influence of their peer group. We also examine how the strength of social  influence varies with friendship status and network position.

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:ueaeco:2017_02&r=soc

 2. Tax morale and the role of social norms and reciprocity: Evidence from a randomized survey experiment

    Doerrenberg, Philipp

    Peichl, Andreas

 We present the first randomized survey experiment in the context of tax  compliance to assess the role of social norms and reciprocity for intrinsic  tax morale. We find that participants in a reciprocity treatment have  significantly higher tax morale than those in a social-norm treatment. This  suggests that a potential backfire effect of social norms is outweighed if  the consequences of violating the social norm are made salient. We further  document the anatomy of intrinsic motivations for tax compliance and present  first evidence that previously found gender effects in tax morale are not  driven by differences in risk preferences.

    Keywords: Tax compliance,Tax evasion,Intrinsic motivations,Tax morale,Social norms,Reciprocity

    JEL: H20 H32 H50 C93

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:17045&r=soc

 3. Civic capital and support for the welfare state

    Cerqueti, Roy

    Sabatini, Fabio

    Ventura, Marco

 We model how the interplay between tax surveillance institutions and civic  capital shapes taxpayers' support for welfare state. We show that, when tax  surveillance is tight, rational civic-minded individuals express greater  support for welfare spending than uncivic ones. We provide empirical evidence  of these preferences using data from Italy, a country that has long posed a  puzzle for public economists for its limited civic capital and large welfare  state.

    Keywords: welfare state,redistribution,tax surveillance,trust,civic capital,social capital

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esprep:171243&r=soc

 4. Urban Interactions

    Kim, Jun Sung

    Patacchini, Eleonora

    Picard, Pierre M

    Zenou, Yves

 This paper studies social-tie formation when individuals care about the  geographical location of other individuals. In our model, the intensity of  social interactions can be chosen at the same time as friends. We  characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social  capital (the value of social interactions offered by each agent) for a  general distribution of individuals in the urban geographical space. We show  that greater geographical dispersion decreases the incentives to socially  interact. We also show that the equilibrium frequency of interactions is  lower than the effcient one. Using a unique geo-coded dataset of friendship  networks among adolescents in the United States, we estimate the model and  validate that agents interact less than the social first best optimum. Our  policy analysis suggests that, given the same cost, subsidizing social  interactions yields a higher total welfare than subsidizing transportation  costs.

    Keywords: policies.; Social interactions; urban economic

    JEL: R1 R23 Z13

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12432&r=soc

 5. Deviant or Wrong? The Effects of Norm Information on the Efficacy of Punishment

    Cristina Bicchieri (University of Pennsylvania)

    Eugen Dimant (University of Pennsylvania)

    Erte Xiao (Monash University)

 A stream of research examining the effect of punishment on conformity  indicates that punishment can backfire and lead to suboptimal social  outcomes. In such studies, the enforcement of a behavioral rule to cooperate  originates from a single party. This feature may raise concern about the  legitimacy of the rule and thereby make it easy for the agents to take a  penalty and excuse their selfish behavior. We address the question of  punishment legitimacy in our experiment by shedding light upon the importance  of social norms and their interplay with punishment mechanisms. We show that  the separate enforcement mechanisms of punishment and norms cannot achieve  higher cooperation rates. In fact, conformity is significantly increased only  in those cases when social norms and punishment are combined, but only when  cooperation is cheap. Interestingly, when cooperation is expensive we find  that the combination of punishment and empirical information about others  conformity can also have traceable detrimental effects on conformity levels.

 Our results have important implications for researchers and practitioners  alike.

    Keywords: Conformity, Experiments, Punishment, Social Norms, Trust Game

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcdx:2017-14&r=soc

 6. Tax Morale and Policy Intervention

    Nordblom, Katarina (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

 This paper deals with tax morale and how norms may evolve over time. The  special focus is on buying black-market services. I apply mechanisms from  social psychology to explain how personal norms may evolve due to one's own  past behavior through self-signaling and due to conformity based on social  interactions. These changes over time result in multiple equilibria, so that  the economy can develop stronger social norms and less evasion over time, or  weaker norms and more evasion in the long run. An economy on a trajectory  toward the “bad” equilibrium may be permanently pushed onto a trajectory  toward the “good” equilibrium by means of a suffciently strong temporary  policy. Observations from a recent tax reform in Sweden strongly support the  theory and suggest that other policies than enforcement may indeed be a  powerful tool in inuencing both behavior and attitudes.

    Keywords: Social norms; Endogenous norms; Tax evasion; Self-signaling; Normative conformity.

    JEL: D91 H26

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0711&r=soc

 7. Internet and Politics: Evidence from U.K. Local Elections and Local Government Policies

    Alessandro Gavazza

    Mattia Nardotto

    Tommaso M. Valletti

 We empirically study the effects of broadband internet diffusion on local  election outcomes and on local government policies using rich data from the  U.K. Our analysis suggests that the internet has displaced other media with  greater news content (i.e., radio and newspapers), thereby decreasing voter  turnout, most notably among less-educated and younger individuals. In turn,  we find suggestive evidence that local government expenditures and taxes are  lower in areas with greater broadband diffusion, particularly expenditures  targeted at less-educated voters. Our findings are consistent with the idea  that voters’ information plays a key role in determining electoral  participation, government policies and government size.

    JEL: D72

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6659&r=soc

 8. The Impact of Social Media On Belief Formation

    Schwarz, Marco A. (University of Innsbruck)  Social media are becoming increasingly important in our society and change  the way people communicate, how they acquire information, and how they form  beliefs. Experts are concerned that the rise of social media may make  interaction and information exchange among like-minded individuals more  pronounced and therefore lead to increased disagreement in a society. This  paper analyzes a learning model with endogenous network formation in which  people have different types and live in different regions. I show that when  the importance of social media increases, the amount of disagreement in the  society first decreases and then increases. Simultaneously people of the same  type hold increasingly similar beliefs. Furthermore, people who find it hard  to communicate with people in the same region may interact with similar  people online and consequently hold extreme beliefs. Finally, I propose a  simple way to model people who neglect a potential correlation of signals and  show that these people may be made worse off by social media.

    Keywords: social media; network formation; social learning; polarization; homophily; correlation neglect;

    JEL: C72 D72 D83 D85 Z10 Z19

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rco:dpaper:57&r=soc

 9. Humans reciprocate intentional harm by discriminating against group peers

    David Hugh-Jones (University of East Anglia)

    Itay Ron

    Ro'i Zultan (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)  Cycles of intergroup revenge appear in large scale conflicts. We  experimentally test the hypothesis that humans practice group-based reciprocity: if someone harms or helps them, they harm or help other members  of that person's group. Subjects played a trust game, then allocated money  between other people. Senders whose partners returned more in the trust game  gave more to that partner's group members. The effect was about half as large  as the effect of direct reciprocity. Receivers' allocations to group members  were not affected by their partners' play in the trust game, suggesting that  group reciprocity was only triggered when the partner’s intentions were  unequivocal.

    Keywords: upstream reciprocity, group identity, intergroup conflict

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:ueaeco:2017_03&r=soc

10. Cooperation and Punishment: The Individual-Level Perspective

    Felix Albrecht

    Sebastian Kube

    Christian Traxler

 We explore the relationship between individuals’ disposition to cooperate  and their inclination to engage in peer punishment as well as their relative  importance for mitigating social dilemmas. Using a novel strategy-method  approach we identify individual punishment patterns and link them with  individual cooperation patterns. Classifying N = 628 subjects along these two  dimensions documents that cooperation and punishment patterns are intuitively  aligned for most individuals. However, the data also reveal a sizable share  of free-riders that punish pro-socially and conditional cooperators that do  not engage in punishment. Analyzing the interplay between types in an  additional experiment, we show that pro-social punishers are more crucial for  achieving cooperation than conditional cooperators. Incorporating information  on punishment types explains large amounts of the between and within group  variation in cooperation.

    Keywords: strategy method, punishment patterns, type classification, conditional cooperation, public-goods game

    JEL: C90 D03

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_6284&r=soc

11. Peer sanctioning in isomorphic provision and appropriation social dilemmas

    Abhijit Ramalingam (University of East Anglia)

    Antonio J. Morales (University of Malaga)

    James M. Walker (Indiana University)  This study brings together two strands of experimental literature, positive  versus negative frames of social dilemmas and the effectiveness of peer  sanctioning in promoting cooperation. Examining provision and appropriation  games that are strategically and payoff isomorphic, we find evidence of less  cooperation in the appropriation game. We also find that peer sanctioning is  able to overcome the decrease in cooperation in the appropriation game,  leading to greater relative increases in contributions and earnings in that  decision setting. This result is linked to the fact that low contributors are  targeted for punishment more frequently in the appropriation game. All the  experimental findings are compatible with the existence of reciprocal  preferences a la Cox, Friedman and Sadiraj (2008).

    Keywords: social dilemma, experiment, provision, appropriation, cooperation, punishment, reciprocal preferences

    JEL: C72 C91 C92 D02 H41

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:wcbess:16-09r&r=soc

12. Giving in dictator games: Experimenter demand effect or preference over the rules of the game?

    Nadine Chlass (University of Jena)

    Peter G. Moffatt (University of East Anglia)  Which preference underlies giving in dictator games? To date, the  experimental evidence has either been interpreted as a preference over the  distribution of pay-offs, or as an experimenter demand effect. We show that  under strict dictator-dictator as well as strict dictator-recipient  anonymity, giving in dictator games springs from a preference over the  distribution of decision rights. In contrast, concerns which trigger  experimenter demand (Andreoni and Bernheim 2009) are negatively correlated  with dictator game giving. Our experiments cover a series of dictator game  variants which have sparked the experimenter demand debate. In addition, we  identify the sets of ethical ideals that dictators em-ploy to derive the  'right' course of action in a formal moral judgement test and model dictator  transfers econometrically by means of dictators' actual ethical ideals. Our  results explain the lion’s share of results from the literature: lower  transfers when dictators earn the pie (Cherry et al. 2002); lower transfers  when 'take' options are available (List 2007; Bardsley 2008); lower transfers  when anonymity is lifted (Hoffmann et al. 1994); generous dictators  consistently pre-ferring to avoid the game altogether, if given the option  (Lazear et al. 2012), and findings that social norms and beliefs cause  dictator transfers (Krupka and Weber 2013; Di Tella et al. 2015; Kimbrough  and Vostroknutov 2015).

    Keywords: altruism, dictator games, moral judgement, experimenter demand effect, equality of decision rights, purely procedural preferences

    JEL: C91 D63 D64

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

13. The role of morals in three-player ultimatum games

    Sandro Casal (University of Milan)

    Francesco Fallucchi (University of East Anglia)

    Simone Quercia (University of Bonn)

 We experimentally investigate the role of responders' moral concerns in  three-player ultimatum bargaining. In our experiment, proposers can increase  their share of the pie at the expenses of an NGO that conducts humanitarian  aid in emergency areas. We find that responders are not willing to engage in  'immoral' transactions only when fully informed about proposers' behavior  toward the NGO. Under complete information, their willingness to reject  offers increases with the strength of the harm to the NGO. Moreover, the  possibility to nullify the effects of the negative externality through  rejection further increases their willingness to reject. We show that the  latter result is better explained by a model of consequentialist moral  concerns toward the NGO rather than deontological morality about own actions.

    Keywords: three-player ultimatum game, moral reasoning, experiment

    JEL: C72 C91 D6

URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uea:wcbess:16-05r&r=soc

This nep-soc issue comes without any express or implied warranty. You may contact the editor by reply to this mail.

General information on the NEP project can be found at http://nep.repec.org.

For comments please write to the director of NEP, Marco Novarese at < director @ nep point repec point org >.

The infrastructure of NEP is sponsored by the School of Economics and Finance, Massey University, New Zealand.