Do reciprocators exploit or resist moral wiggle room? An experimental analysis

Tobias Regner and Astrid Matthey
Additional contact information
Astrid Matthey: Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena

No 2015-027, Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Abstract: By now there is substantial experimental evidence that people make use of 'moral wiggle room' (Dana et al., 2007), that is, they tend to exploit moral excuses for selfish behavior. However, this evidence is limited to dictator games. In our experiment, a trust game variant, we study whether moral wiggle room also prevails, when reciprocity is a potential motivation for being generous. Trustees' back transfer choices are elicited for five different transfer levels of the trustor. Moreover, we ask trustees to provide their back transfer schedule for different scenarios that vary the implementation probability of the back transfer. This design allows us to identify subjects who reciprocate and analyze how these reciprocators respond to the provision of moral wiggle room. Our results suggest that moral wiggle room exists as well in the context of reciprocity. Among our subjects, 40% of the reciprocators exploited moral wiggle room.

Keywords: social preferences; pro-social behavior; experiments; reciprocity; moral wiggle room; self-image concerns (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D03 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2015/wp_2015_027.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2015-027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Jena Economics Research Papers from Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Markus Pasche ().