Comparing Students to Workers: The Effects of Social Framing on Behavior in Distribution Games

By J. Carpenter, Stephen V. Burks, E. Verhoogen. Social Science Research Network, 2004

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To investigate the external validity of Ultimatum and Dictator game behavior we conduct experiments in field settings with naturally occurring variation in "social framing." Our participants are students at Middlebury College, non-traditional students at Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC), and employees at a Kansas City distribution center. Ultimatum game offers are ordered: KCKCC > employee > Middlebury. In the Dictator game employees are more generous than students in either location. This indicates that workers behaved distinctly from both student groups because their allocations do not decrease between games, an effect we attribute to the social framing of the workplace.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/241774a78e438213fb326d6342f6aae8cee0417c

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Citations in the corpus

Behavioural Development Economics: Lessons from Field Labs in the Developing World (2008, methodology): “Due to the asymmetry of their data, Coller and Williams (1999) report median IDRs between 17 and 20 per cent using student data while Harrison et al.”
Altruistic behavior in a representative dictator experiment (2008, methodology): “Carpenter et al. (2005a) for example show that although typical college students are sensitive to the fact that the recipient cannot veto the dictator's allocation, a more generally representative slice of participants who work in a warehouse facility in Kansas are not.”
Redesigning Teams and Incentives in a Merger: An Experiment with Managers and Students (2004, unknown): “and Levin (1989), and Carpenter, Burks and Verhoogen (2003) have underlined differences”
Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems (2012, unknown): “After adolescence, mean offers continue to increase again through the university years, not reaching the adult plateau until about age 25 (Carter and Irons 1991; Harbaugh et al. 2002; Carpenter et al. 2005; Bellemare et al. 2008).”
More than Thirty Years of Ultimatum Bargaining Experiments: Motives, Variations, and a Survey of the Recent Literature (2013, unknown): “…age, gender, income and education effects are often inconclusive (recent contributions are, for instance, Saad and Gill, 2001; Eckel and Grossman, 2001; Solnick, 2001; Carpenter et al., 2005; Garcia-Gallego et al., 2012), especially if one takes a look at the overall picture over the last 30 years.”
The effect of stakes in distribution experiments (2005, methodology): “…experiments with Middlebury College students using a set of single-blind instructions similar to Forsythe et al. (1994).1 Volunteers were elicited from the entire population of approximately 1 The specifics of our protocol (i.e., our instructions and survey) are reported in Carpenter et al. (2004).”
Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments (2010, unknown): “Other work shows that offers do not hit their adult plateau in behavioral games until around age 24 (Carpenter et al., 2005), after which time offers do not change with age until people reach old age.”
Self-selection and variations in the laboratory measurement of other-regarding preferences across subject pools: evidence from one college student and two adult samples (2013, methodology): “In the context of bargaining games, Carpenter et al. (2005) study student and non-student (warehouse worker) samples in the US using ultimatum game and dictator games.”
Pro-social behavior in a natural setting (2004, background): “We are able to show that, even under anonymous conditions, a large number of individuals are prepared to donate a significant sum of money over a number of years.”
Do Social Preferences Increase Productivity? Field Experimental Evidence from Fishermen in Toyama Bay (2011, unknown): “Carter and Castillo (2002) conduct trust and distribution games in South Africa and find that their experimental measures of altruism and trust are positively associated with household expenditures.”