25/2007
December
Inequity Concerns in Social Networks
 
P. Brañas-Garza, R. Cobo-Reyes, M. P. Espinosa, N. Jiménez, J. Kovárík, G. Ponti


This paper explores the role of social integration on inequity concerns. Using a three-phase experimental protocol we first elicit a social network from a group of undergraduate students in Economics; in the second phase, 169 of these subjects have to assign a fixed amount of money to only one of two individuals and, then, in the third stage they decide how much they are willing to pay to repair the created inequality. Our experimental data indicate that standard measures of network theory, such as betweenness, out-degree and reciprocal degree, have a positive effect on inequity concerns. These results suggest that (1) pro-sociality and social networks coevolve and (2) information on the social network structure, in which subjects are embedded is important to account for their behavior.

 
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