Altruism and the pressure to share: Lab evidence from Tanzania

Salvatore Di Falco; Razack Lokina; Peter Martinsson; Paolo Pin

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0212747

Altruism and the pressure to share: Lab evidence from Tanzania

PLoS One. 2019 May 21;14(5):e0212747. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0212747. eCollection 2019.

Authors

Salvatore Di Falco¹, Razack Lokina², Peter Martinsson³, Paolo Pin^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Economics and Econometrics, Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
² Department of Economics, University of Dar Es Salaam, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
³ Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
⁴ Dipartimento di Economia Politica e Statistica, Università di Siena, Siena, Italy.
⁵ IGIER and BIDSA, Università Bocconi, Milano, Italy.

Abstract

We propose a novel laboratory experiment to document the pressure to share income within social networks in Africa. We find that the redistributive pressure exerted via the possibility of receiving a claim increases altruism, while the possibility of hiding from such claim reduces it. Our results indicate that sharing norms are crucial drivers of giving to other members of the network. We also find that pressure to share has a detrimental effect on the undertaking of profitable but risky investments.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Altruism*
Decision Making
Female
Humans
Information Dissemination*
Male
Models, Theoretical
Social Behavior*
Social Networking
Social Norms
Tanzania / epidemiology

Grants and funding

Financial support from the World Bank via the Environment for Development Initiative (EfD), and by the Italian Ministry of Education Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (PRIN) Grant 2015592CTH, is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.