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Temporal dynamics of pro-social behavior: an experimental analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Jan Schmitz
Jan Schmitz*
Affiliation:
Department of Humanities, Social, and Political Science, Chair of Economics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), 8092 Zürich, Switzerland
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Individuals have opportunities to behave pro-socially at different points in time. This study investigates the interdependence between temporarily separated good deeds and their effect on individual pro-social behavior. In a multi-session laboratory experiment, subjects play a donation dictator game. The first group of subjects runs through two sessions on the same day. For the second group, there is a time-lag of one week between sessions. In both treatments, subjects decrease their donation decision in the second session. Spillover effects of pro-social behavior, however, decrease over time as the reduction in donations is smaller for subjects with larger time-lag between decisions.

Keywords

Charitable givingSocial preferencesExperimental economicsBehavioral spilloversC91D03H41
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 15 March 2019 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-018-9583-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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