CeDEx workshop - Enrique Fatas (University of East Anglia)

The stability of pro-social behavior

by Enrique Fatas and Shaun P. Hargreaves Heap

Abstract

That individuals exhibit pro-social behavior is often claimed to be one of the important findings of experimental economics. The evidence for this largely comes from aggregate behavior in a variety of games and little is known about whether individuals actually exhibit consistency in their pro-social behavior. This paper reports on an experiment that tests for such individual consistency across several games. We find considerable individual consistency in pro-sociality across simultaneous games, but there is relatively little consistency either across sequential games or between simultaneous and sequential ones. We also find a gender dimension to this difference in consistency (despite the absence of a gender difference in prosociality itself). Males tend to be more consistent across simultaneous games than females, but the consistency across sequential games is wholly accounted for by females