Descriptive Norms and Guilt Aversion - Kölner UniversitätsPublikationsServer

Danilov, Anastasia ORCID: 0000-0003-3662-4897, Khalmetski, Kiryl and Sliwka, Dirk (2021). Descriptive Norms and Guilt Aversion. J. Econ. Behav. Organ., 191. S. 293 - 312. AMSTERDAM: ELSEVIER. ISSN 1879-1751

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DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2021.09.002

Abstract

It has been argued that guilt aversion (the desire to meet others' expectations) and the social norm compliance (the desire to act similarly to other individuals in the same sit-uation) are important drivers of human behavior. However, as we show in a theoretical model, these two motives are empirically indistinguishable when only one signal (either the expectation of a person affected by the choice or a signal about the descriptive norm) is revealed as each of these signals transmit information on the other benchmark. We ad-dress this problem by running an experiment in which signals for both benchmarks are revealed simultaneously. We find that both types of information affect dictator transfers in a one-shot game, yet the information about the behavior of others has a stronger effect than the disclosed recipient's expectation. The effect of the recipient's expectation is non -monotonic and becomes negative for very high expectations. We provide further evidence for the importance of guilt aversion in a second experiment where we display the recipi-ent's expectation and the expectation of a randomly picked recipient of another dictator. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Item Type:

Journal Article

Creators:

Creators	Email	ORCID	ORCID Put Code
Danilov, Anastasia	UNSPECIFIED	orcid.org/0000-0003-3662-4897	UNSPECIFIED
Khalmetski, Kiryl	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED
Sliwka, Dirk	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED	UNSPECIFIED