Abstract
This paper describes central topics in our research program on social preferences. The discussion covers experimental designs that discriminate among alternative components of preferences such as unconditional altruism, positive reciprocity, trust (in positive reciprocity), negative reciprocity, and fear (of negative reciprocity). The paper describes experimental data on effects of social distance and decision context on reciprocal behavior and male vs. female and group vs. individual differences in reciprocity. The exposition includes experimental designs that provide direct tests of alternative models of social preferences and summarizes implications of data for the models. The discussion reviews models of other-regarding preferences that are and are not conditional on others revealed intentions and the implications of data for these models.
Noah Langdale Jr Eminent Scholar Chair and Director of the Experimental Economics Center (ExCEN), Georgia State University. This paper was written while the author was a Visiting Scholar at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University.
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Cox, J.C. (2007). Trust, Fear, Reciprocity, and Altruism: Theory and Experiment. In: Oda, S.H. (eds) Developments on Experimental Economics. Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, vol 590. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-68660-6_5
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