Abstract
The Dictator Game has been a helpful tool to study whether men or women are more generous. But recent work suggests that motivations other than generosity also influence behavior in this game. Image concerns and expectations management may cause dictators to “give reluctantly”; that is, to share money with the recipient if asked to, but to renege on their gifts if they can do so without being detected. We provide evidence from two separate experiments that females are more likely than males to give reluctantly in the Dictator Game. After accounting for retraction of gifts, males and females transfer similar amounts to the recipient in expectation. The results suggest that gender differences in non-payoff-related motivations may play a role in producing gender differences in giving in the Dictator Game.
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Notes
Endowments are fairly similar in purchasing power across locations: at the time of sessions in Santiago, 5000 CLP exchange for approximately 8 USD.
Our design is inspired by Dana et al. (2006), who run a Dictator Game with dictators and recipients sitting in separate rooms. After deciding how to allocate $10, dictators face a binary choice between implementing their allocation, or taking $9 and leaving $0 for the recipient while also leaving the recipient unaware that the game was played. In our design, we ask dictators to choose a retraction probability between 10 and 90 percent, rather than giving them a binary choice, to obtain a more granular measure of preferences over retraction, and to be able to implement the retraction quietly while dictators and recipients sitting in the same room. This also implies that instructions are common knowledge at all times in our experiment.
Of these, two male subjects participated twice in Santiago. We dropped their second participation (two observations) from the data.
This is not to say that transferring 0 ECU and then selecting a retraction probability larger than 10 percent is a mistake or noise in the data. This behavior can also be rationalized by non-payoff-related motivations, such that the dictator is willing to give up 1 ECU to hide from the recipient the fact that they acted selfishly in the Dictator Game, or that the dictator is engaging in “moral cleansing” or “conscience accounting” after having acted selfishly in the Dictator Game (Sachdeva et al. 2009; Gneezy et al. 2014).
Thus, we fail to replicate Broberg et al.’s (2007) finding that subjects who make larger donations in the Dictator Game are more prone to exit. In fact, participants who transfer 5 or more ECU in our Dictator Game are 13 percentage points less likely to select a probability larger than 10 percent than participants who transfer 2–4 ECU (p = 0.003, from regressions analogous to Table 3b with the pooled data). This result seems to be more in line with findings of within-subject positive correlation in prosocial behavior across tasks, such as in Dariel and Nikiforakis (2014).
Although Niederle (2016) suggests a different interpretation to the findings in the literature.
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This research was supported in part by a grant from the Science of Philanthropy Initiative. I also would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor, Nikos Nikiforakis, for comments that greatly improved this paper.
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Klinowski, D. Gender differences in giving in the Dictator Game: the role of reluctant altruism. J Econ Sci Assoc 4, 110–122 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0058-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0058-1