Do Social Preferences Increase Productivity? Field Experimental Evidence from Fishermen in Toyama Bay

By Jeffrey P. Carpenter, E. Seki. Social Science Research Network, 2011

321 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although, we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to measures obtained from a field experiment with a population of participants who face a social dilemma in their daily lives (i.e. team production), we do find strong links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the stock of social preferences evolves endogeously with respect to how widely team production is utilized.

Subfields: Education, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9bbb245801d3f8b7af1437d8a0492f431d044fa

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Citations in the corpus

Heterogeneous Social Preferences and the Dynamics of Free Riding in Public Goods (2006, unknown): “Our final step will investigate the dynamics of free riding as a function of heterogeneous preferences.”
Trust, Growth and Well-Being: New Evidence and Policy Implications (2013, background): “Similarly, Carpenter and Seki (2011) have Japanese fishermen play a repeated public goods game with and without an option for “social disapproval”.”
RISK SHARING, COMMITMENT, AND INFORMATION: AN EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS (2008, background): “8In experiments, Falk, Fehr, and Fischbacher (2000), Bowles, Carpenter and Gintis (2001), Masclet, Noussair, Tucker and Villeval (2003), and Carpenter and Seki (2004) for instance show that social or shame-based sanctions can be used to enhance commitment and that such sanctions are commonly threate”
Vote-Buying and Reciprocity (2011, unknown): “Several studies have shown that behavior in the lab can be predictive of a person’s decision to, for instance, repay their microfinance loans (Karlan, 2005), donate to charities (Benz and Meier, 2008), or exert more effort in team production (Carpenter and Seki, 2011).”
Conditional cooperation: Behavioral regularities from the lab and the field and their policy implications (2006, background): “Specifically, Carpenter and Seki (2005) collected data from fishing hauls, which they relate to measures of the fishermen's social preferences.”
On the External Validity of Laboratory Tax Compliance Experiments (2015, unknown): “More recently there are investigations of behavior of fishermen (Carpenter and Seki, 2011) and of water markets (Chermak et al., 2013).”
Socioeconomic Status and Inequalities in Children’s IQ and Economic Preferences (2017, unknown): “In this respect, our results contribute to literature showing that gaps in economic opportunities open up early in life (Case, Lubotsky, and Paxson 2002; Heckman 2007).39 Given that patience, risk-taking, and altruism determine the shape of the utility function, our results also have implications…”
Conducting interactive experiments online (2017, unknown): “21 This result is consistent with recent literature reporting college students to be less cooperative than non-students and other adults (Belot et al. 2010; Carpenter and Seki 2011; Ga¨chter et al. 2004; Stoop et al. 2012).”
Behavioural Development Economics: Lessons from Field Labs in the Developing World (2008, background): “For example, while Cardenas et al. (2000) and Carpenter and Seki (2005) provide some evidence that formal institutions can crowd out social preferences, the dynamics and, in particular, the process of coevolution is not understood very well.”