Identity, Dignity and Taboos: Beliefs as Assets

By Roland Bénabou, Jean Tirole. Social Science Research Network, 2007

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze social and economic phenomena involving beliefs which people value and invest in, for affective or functional reasons. Individuals are at times uncertain about their own 'deep values' and infer them from their past choices, which then come to define 'who they are'. Identity investments increase when information is scarce or when a greater endowment of some asset (wealth, career, family, culture) raises the stakes on viewing it as valuable (escalating commitments). Taboos against transactions or the mere contemplation of tradeoffs arise to protect fragile beliefs about the 'priceless' value of certain assets (life, freedom, love, faith) or things one 'would never do'. Whether such behaviours are welfare-enhancing or reducing depends on whether beliefs are sought for a functional value (sense of direction, self-discipline) or for 'mental consumption' motives (self-esteem, anticipatory feelings). Escalating commitments can thus lead to a 'hedonic treadmill', and competing identities cause dysfunctional failures to invest in high-return activities (education, adapting to globalization, assimilation), or even the destruction of productive assets. In social interactions, norm violations elicit a forceful response (exclusion, harassment) when they threaten a strongly held identity, but further erode morale when it was initially weak. Concerns for pride, dignity or wishful thinking lead to the inefficient breakdown of Coasian bargaining even under symmetric information, as partners seek to self-enhance and shift blame by turning down 'insultingly low' offers.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03d160e1e61d445bdde6cca11fd1426c835c50a4

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Citations in the corpus

Social Identity and Inequality: The Impact of China's Hukou System (2015, unknown): “An expanding theoretical (Shayo, 2005; Fang and Loury, 2005; Benabou and Tirole, 2007; Horst, Kirman and Teschl, 2006) and a growing number of experimental economics studies show that social identity has important impact on preferences and economic behavior (Eckel and Grossman 2005; Goette, Huffman…”
What's the Monetary Value of Distributive Justice? (2006, unknown): “[PLEASE INSERT TABLE 5 ABOUT HERE] As shown by Table 5, beliefs are a much more powerful motive for support for 12See Bénabou and Tirole (2006) and Corneo and Jeanne (2007) for recent theoretical work on the management of beliefs and the choice of value systems.”
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets (2013, background): “meier and Parker (2005), Bernheim and Thomadsen (2005), Koszegi (2006) and Benabou and Tirole (2007) .”
Gender Role Attitudes and Women's Labor Market Participation: Opting-Out, AIDS and the President Appeal of Housewifery (2015, background): “The theoretical underpinnings of the findings are rooted in economic identity theory, which argues that saliency of identities is an important factor in the agents’ decisions (Akerlof and Kranton, 2000; Bénabou and Tirole, 2006).”
Punishment and counter-punishment in public good games: Can we really govern ourselves? (2008, unknown): “Comparing columns (3) and (4) one sees that the higher contributions enforced by one-sided punishment in P increase average earnings by 6.”
The Scope of Cooperation: Values and Incentives (2008, unknown): “Manipulating (22)-(23) and (18)-(19), a sufficient condition for this to happen is: 1− 1− f 2δ > ∆ > f”