- External publication
Where do social preferences come from?
Chaning Jang & John Lynham
- December 1, 2015
- 1:27 am
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PROJECT TYPE
DOI
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BEHAVIORAL THEME
OVERVIEW
Where do preferences for fairness come from? We use a unique field setting to test for a spillover of sharing norms from the workplace to a laboratory experiment. Fishermen working in teams receive random income shocks (catching fish) that they must regularly divide among themselves. We demonstrate a clear correlation between sharing norms in the field and sharing norms in the lab. Furthermore, the spillover effect is stronger for fishermen who have been exposed to a sharing norm for longer, suggesting that our findings are not driven by selection effects. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that work environments shape social preferences.
THEMATIC AREAS
Where does fairness come from? Scholars have investigated the cultural and biological origins of fairness and we supplement this research by exploring the role of institutional factors. We show that fishermen from a single culture have different notions of fairness that arise from profit sharing institutions related to their work environment. Fishermen accustomed to 50/50 splits are more likely to reject unequal splits than those accustomed to 60/40 sharing rules.