- A-Z
- Jena Economic Resea...
- Volume 1
- Moral Distance and ...
- Autor(in)
- Erschienen
- 20. August 2007
- Nummer des Discussion-Papers
-
2007-047
- Schlagwort(e)
-
dictator game
experimental economics
moral distance
moral motivations
- Zusammenfsg.
-
We perform an experimenta linvestigation using a dictator game in which individuals must make a moral decision —to give or not to give an amount of money to poor people in the Third World. A questionnaire in which the subjects are asked about the reasons for their decision shows that, at least in this case, moral motivations carry a heavy weight in the decision: the majority of dictators give the money for reasons of a consequentialist nature. Based on the results presented here and of other analogous experiments, we conclude that dicator behavior can be understood in terms of moral distance rather than social distance and that it systematically deviates from the egoism assumption in economic models and game theory.
- article pub. typess JER
- Research article
- article languages JER
- Englisch
- article research fields JER
- experimental economics
- JEL-Classification for JER
- A13 - Relation of Economics to Social Values ; C72 - Noncooperative Games ; C91 - Laboratory, Individual Behavior