Identifying Social Norms Using Coordination Games: Why Does Dictator Game Sharing Vary?

Abstract

We introduce an incentivized elicitation method for identifying social norms that uses simple coordination games. We demonstrate that concern for the norms we elicit and for money predict changes in behavior across several variants of the dictator game, including data from a novel experiment and from prior published laboratory studies, that are unaccounted for by most current theories of social preferences. Moreover, we find that the importance of social norm compliance and of monetary considerations is fairly constant across different experiments. This consistency allows prediction of treatment effects across experiments, and implies that subjects have a generally stable willingness to sacrifice money to take behaviors that are socially appropriate.