Social context reveals gender differences in cooperative behavior

A number of previous researches indicate that men prefer competition over cooperation, and it is sometimes suggested that women show the opposite behavioral preference. In the current study the effects of social context on gender differences in cooperation are investigated. For the purpose, we compared men and women behavior under two social conditions: in groups of strangers and in groups with long-term socialization—groups of friends. The differences were found in changes in the level of cooperation, taking into account the effects of mixing social and gender variables. Social interaction and communication made cooperation of group members strength and sustainable. However, men’s and women’s cooperative behavior in groups differed. Women were initially more inclined to cooperate in interaction with strangers. Men showed greater sensitivity to sociality effects. They tended to make cooperative decisions more often if there were friends in the group. Furthermore, men cooperated with previously unknown people after socialization with them significantly more than women.     

Dissertation abstract: Reputational benefits of altruism and altruistic punishment

Recent studies in experimental economics have shown that many people have other-regarding preferences, potentially including preferences for altruism, reciprocity, and fairness. It is useful to investigate why people possess such preferences and what functional purpose they might serve outside the laboratory, because evolutionary and social learning perspectives both predict that cooperative sentiments should only exist if they bring benefits that outweigh the costs of other-regarding behavior. Theories of costly signaling suggest that altruistic acts may function (with or without intention) as signals of unobservable qualities such as resources or cooperative intent, and altruists may benefit (possibly unintentionally) from the advertisement of such qualities. After reviewing the theories that could potentially account for the evolution of altruism (Chapter 1), I test some predictions about cooperation derived from costly signaling theory. In Chapter 2, I show that participants in experimental public goods games were more cooperative when they had cues that they could benefit from having a good reputation, and that there was apparently some competition to be the most generous group member. Furthermore, in subsequent trust games, people tended to trust high public goods contributors more than low contributors. Chapter 3 failed to find evidence that granting high status to people makes them more likely to contribute to public goods or punish free-riders, but there was suggestive evidence that physical proximity to the experimenter affected contributions and punishment. In Chapter 4, I found that people tended to trust others who were willing to incur costs to punish those who free-ride on group cooperation provided that such punishment was justified, and men were more punitive than women. In Chapter 5, I show that women find altruistic men more desirable than neutral men for long-term relationships. Together, these results suggest that humans do treat altruism as a signal of willingness to be cooperative. These findings are discussed with respect to the adaptive design of cooperative sentiments as well as the current debate over group selection. Dissertation: Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontarion Currently: Post-Doc, Department of Neurobiology & Behavior, Cornell University     

Altruism in individual and joint-giving decisions: What's gender got to do with it?

Abstract

This paper uses dictator experiments to examine gender differences in altruistic behavior in the United States when decisions are made individually and jointly. In anonymous individual giving to charity, women give substantially more than men, and in paired settings, mixed-sex groups give the most while all male pairs give the least. Evidence supports social information and negotiation effects as participants change giving toward that of their partners. Social image effects are found only in mixed-sex groups, indicating a gender-based component to the value of the social signal sent. Although men and women appear to have similar influence, the positive social image effect pushes giving in mixed-sex pairs above the sum of the members' individual gifts because the less altruistic partners (usually men) adjust their giving upward more than the more altruistic partners (usually women) reduce giving. Therefore, increasing women's participation in traditionally male spheres of decision making may result in more altruistic economic behavior.     

Control Without Deception: Individual Behaviour in Free-Riding Experiments Revisited

Lying to participants offers an experimenter the enticing prospect of making others' behaviour a controlled variable, but is eschewed by experimental economists because it may pollute the pool of subjects. This paper proposes and implements a new experimental design, the Conditional Information Lottery, which offers all the benefits of deception without actually deceiving anyone. The design should be suitable for most economics experiments, and works by a modification of an already standard device, the Random Lottery incentive system. The deceptive scenarios of designs which use deceit are replaced with fictitious scenarios, each of which, from a subject's viewpoint, has a chance of being true. The design is implemented in a sequential play public good experiment prompted by Weimann's (1994) result, from a deceptive design, that subjects are more sensitive to freeriding than cooperation on the part of others. The experiment provides similar results to Weimann's, in that subjects are at least as cooperative when uninformed about others' behaviour as they are if reacting to high contributions. No deception is used and the data cohere well both internally and with other public goods experiments. In addition, simultaneous play is found to be more efficient than sequential play, and subjects contribute less at the end of a sequence than at the start. The results suggest pronounced elements of overconfidence, egoism and (biased) reciprocity in behaviour, which may explain decay in contributions in repeated play designs. The experiment shows there is a workable alternative to deception.     

Cooperation,Trust and Economic Development: An Experimental Study in China

Many previous empirical studies have suggested that cooperation and trust affect economic growth. However, the precise relationship between trust and cooperation (i.e. whether trust leads to cooperation or cooperation leads to trust) remains unclear and it is not known how the level of economic development affects the level of cooperation and trust. Using a combination of public goods, gambling game and trust game experiments, we investigate the links among cooperation, trust and economic development in four regions of China. Our results suggest that, first, there is a U‐shaped or V‐shaped relationship between cooperation and economic development. Second, on the one hand, cooperation leads to trust, and on the other hand, more cooperative behaviour may be created by rewarding trusting behaviour. Third, men are more cooperative and trusting than women. Furthermore, we find that the widely used ‘GSS trust’ question from the General Social Survey (GSS) does not predict either cooperation or trust, whereas the questions ‘GSS fair’ and ‘GSS help’ have weak predictive power for trusting behaviour but not for cooperative behaviour.     

Sharing Common Resources in Patriarchal and Status-Based Societies: Evidence from Tanzania

ABSTRACT

In rural African societies, socioeconomic differentiation linked to gender and social status exerts an important influence on the distribution of common-pool resources. Through a behavioral experiment conducted in 2008 in rural Tanzania, this contribution examines the influence of gender and social status on distribution behavior of users of self-governed common watersheds. It finds that men and women with low social status distribute water equally when water is abundant but keep larger shares when water is scarce, although low-status women try to be as fair as possible at the expense of their returns from irrigated agriculture. Men of high social status keep more than half of the available water for themselves, both in abundance and scarcity, and deprive others from sizeable returns from irrigated agriculture. Women of high social status share altruistically when water is abundant and equally when water is scarce, giving up on returns from irrigated agriculture.     

Gender differences in trust and reciprocity: evidence from a large-scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects

This article examines gender differences in an experimental trust game. Recent studies have shown that men trust more and that women are more reciprocal in laboratory experiments. Participants in these studies, however, are typically university students who may not be representative of the entire population. In this study, we use data from a large-scale experiment with heterogeneous subjects who are representative of the German population. We find that men exhibit not only more trusting behaviour, but also more reciprocating behaviour than women. Moreover, our results are indicative of age-dependent gender differences. For men, we find an inverse U-shaped relationship between age, on the one hand, and both trust and reciprocity, on the other; however, we do not find age effects for women.     

Transboundary marine protected areas

Countries exploiting transboundary natural resources face strong incentives to over-exploit. This basic economic insight has been validated empirically where numerous resources such as water, forests, game, and fisheries are found to be in worse condition than those completely contained in single nations. Attempts to solve this challenge through cross-country cooperation have been largely unsuccessful because competitive extraction is often more attractive than adhering to cooperative agreements. Focusing on the fishery, we explore the game-theoretic economics of an alternative to cooperative arrangements, called a transboundary marine protected area (TMPA), which straddles both countries’ waters. We derive the conditions under which it can improve profits and stock biomass, even in the presence of individually-rational non-cooperation across countries. Strikingly, we find that well-designed TMPAs have the potential to completely overcome non-cooperation across countries; this result is strongest for low growth rate species. A TMPA can earn higher harvest benefits for both countries, increase stocks in both countries, and in many cases, can even reproduce the fully cooperative outcome.     

Gender differences in socially responsible consumption. An experimental investigation

We report on a simple experimental study designed to investigate the different gender attitudes towards socially responsible consumption. We use the Vote-with-the-Wallet Game, (VWG), a version of a repeated multiplayer prisoner’s dilemma that mimics the characteristics of the choice between a conventional and a socially responsible product. More precisely we test the effect of three factors: two different frames and an ex-post redistribution mechanism that transfers resources from purely self-interested consumers to responsible ones. We find that women remain significantly more cooperative (choosing more often the responsible good) when the redistribution mechanism is interrupted and are significantly less satisfied about the behaviour of the other players in that treatment.     

Gender Inequality in Education and Kinship Norms in India

Women’s schooling attainment in India continues to lag considerably behind that of men. This paper uses nationally representative district-level data from the 2007–8 District Level Household and Facility Survey (DLHS-3), Indicus Analytics, and the 2011–12 Indian Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II) to examine the role of socioeconomic and cultural factors in influencing gender differentials in schooling. The results provide quantitative evidence of the role of different economic and sociocultural factors on gender disparities in education. The empirical results show that economic development is an important factor in narrowing gender gaps in education, with wealthier districts more likely to educate girls than poorer districts. However, the norm of patrilocal exogamy, where wives migrate to co-reside with their husband’s kin, is associated with worse outcomes for women’s schooling relative to men’s schooling; and, in keeping with anthropological research, gender-differentiated inequities in education are more pronounced in Northern India.     

Gender Differences in Time-Poverty in Rural Mozambique

Based on time-use data from a 2013 primary household survey, this study examines the nature and extent of time-poverty experienced by men and women in peasant households in Mozambique. The main findings indicate that while women's labor allocation to economic activities is comparable to that of men, household chores and care work are almost entirely women's responsibility. The heavy burden of responsibilities leave women significantly time-poorer compared to men. Women's time-poverty worsens when the burden of simultaneous care work is taken into account. In addition, due to multitasking, the work tends to be more taxing. The examination of determinants of time-poverty shows that common measures of individual economic power, such as assets and education, do not necessarily affect the time-poverty faced by women.     

Using Field Experiments to Change the Template of How We Teach Economics

In this article, the author explains why field experiments can improve what we teach and how we teach economics. Economists no longer operate as passive observers of economic phenomena. Instead, they participate actively in the research process by collecting data from field experiments to investigate the economics of everyday life. This change can be shown to students by presenting them with evidence from field experiments. Field experiments related to factor markets, behavioral economics, and discrimination are presented to explain how this approach works across different economic content. The three questions that are highlighted are the following: (1) Why do women get paid less than men in labor markets? (2) How can we use behavioral economics to motivate teachers? (3) What seven words can end third-degree price discrimination?     

退耕还林的目标体系与合作生产过程

本文从生态经济学出发分析了退耕还林工程的目标体系以及合作生产过程属性,提出了有待探讨的理论问题：在环境经济学框架中,既有的研究将外部性内部化作为问题的核心,忽略了生态的系统性以及合作性。本文对退耕还林工程的目标体系、阶段性,以及工程的合作生产过程属性进行了描述,认为生态建设的资金分配制度、财政补贴与生态建设长效机制的关系以及生态补贴的监督机制应该作为理论研究的重点。     

Trust and gender: An examination of behavior and beliefs in the Investment Game

How does gender influence trust, the likelihood of being trusted and the level of trustworthiness? We compare choices by men and women in the Investment Game and use questionnaire data to try to understand the motivations for the behavioral differences. We find that men trust more than women, and women are more trustworthy than men. The relationship between expected return and trusting behavior is stronger among men than women, suggesting that men view the interaction more strategically than women. Women felt more obligated both to trust and reciprocate, but the impact of obligation on behavior varies.     

Women and the social economy in transitional Russia

The present article analyses the role of the social economy in transitional Russia and its consequences for women. The changes in the economic system in the former Soviet Union and its effects is often analysed in general terms. One interesting aspect is whether the changes have similar effects on men and women. The aim here is to highlight how women's situation changes when the economic system changes and how Russian women adapt to these changes. Three types of activities which are carried out by women within the social economy are discussed below, where each of these activities are built on strategies for survival from the Soviet period: distribution of vital goods in rural areas, distribution of information to women and production of services. Although the social economy has a considerable gap to fill in Russia, this has not yet implied that the cooperative sector flourishes. Instead there is a danger that women go from paid work in the state sector to non-paid work within the voluntary sector.     

The challenge of understanding decisions in experimental studies of common pool resource governance

Common pool resource experiments in the laboratory and the field have provided insights that have contrasted to those derived from conventional non-cooperative game theory. Contrary to predictions from non-cooperative game theory, participants are sometimes willing to restrain voluntarily from over extracting resources and use costly punishment to sanction other participants. Something as simple as face-to-face communication has been shown to increase average earnings significantly. In the next generation of experiments, both in the laboratory and in the field, we need to extract more information that provides insight concerning why people make the decisions they make. More information is needed concerning attributes of individuals as well as the social and social-ecological context in which they interact that may give rise to such deviations from theoretical predictions. In the process of extracting more information from participants and the contexts in which they interact, we face several methodological and ethical challenges which we address in this paper.     

Women's education and marriage decisions: Evidence from China

The faster increase in education among women compared with men has been underexplored. Thus, using Chinese data, we evaluate the impacts of a plausibly exogenous increase in educational attainment on women's marriage decisions. An extra year of education does not change women's decision to marry and leads to a brief delay of 0.12 years in their marriage age on average, which is much smaller than the delay among men. Although more educated women and men both have improved labour market outcomes, which may have increased their patience, men experience larger income growth than women do. Moreover, declining physical attractiveness at least partly explains why the delay is less than 1 year. Overall, the results are more reliable after addressing the endogeneity issue.     

Employed Job Search among Young Workers: Do Women Still Search Differently than Men in the Internet Age?

Using data from the 2008–2011 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study explores the job search methods and strategies utilized by young workers. Although women are found to be marginally less likely to engage in on-the-job search than men, when they do they are equally likely to use the internet. The most important gender difference identified is that marriage serves as a strong inhibiting factor to search, both online and offline, for women but not so for men. In terms of search methods, men and women show almost identical patterns of usage. While there is substitution between online and offline search within particular method categories, employed searchers are generally using the internet as a complement to rather than as a replacement for more traditional offline search methods.     

Risk aversion,cooperative membership,and path dependences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia

Smallholder farmers in Sub‐Saharan Africa often mitigate production risks through cooperative membership: institutionalized arrangements where they pool resources and collectively manage production and marketing chains. Cooperative membership has a significant advantage: it cushions detrimental effects of external forces, placing a premium on a risk‐seeking attitude (experimenting and innovating), which can yield greater accumulation. However, cooperatives are self‐selective institutions: relatively better‐endowed farmers, who are usually less risk‐avoidant than poorer ones (a consequence of their broader material bases), tend to be overrepresented. These two realities complicate the causal assessment of the relationships between risk attitudes, farmers’ socioeconomic status, and cooperative membership that is essential to comprehend the role of cooperatives in local capital accumulation. To help resolve this thorny analytical problem, an experimental study was carried out in eastern Ethiopia—a risky production environment where cooperatives feature prominently and relatively affluent farmers exist alongside poorer ones. It unveils the working of specific path dependences: poorer cooperative members are less risk seeking than nonmembers, but at an interval much less than that observed for affluent farmers. For development policies, this suggests that a greater payoff can be expected from investing in farmers’ material bases than from further improving cooperative membership.     

Of mice and men: Within gender variation in strategic behavior

We study behavioral differences across and within genders in a family of ultimatum and dictator games. We find these differences are due not only to altruistic preferences but also beliefs about the strategic behavior of others. The behavior of men in strategic situations is not significantly more aggressive than women on average. But this average masks wide variation in intra-gender behavior. In particular, a sizable minority of males are “mice,” behaving timidly in strategic environments. Our experimental design shows that the standard ultimatum game can mask significant inter- and intra-gender differences in strategic behavior. These behavioral patterns in strategic environments are shown to be correlated with preferences for altruism in non-strategic settings. Such gender differences could well manifest themselves in real-world large-stakes transactions, such as salary negotiations.