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Reciprocity under moral wiggle room: Is it a preference or a constraint?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Tobias Regner Open the ORCID record for Tobias Regner [Opens in a new window]
Tobias Regner*
Affiliation:
University of Jena, Jena, Germany
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We analyze reciprocal behavior when moral wiggle room exists. Dana et al. (Econ Theory 33(1):67–80, 2007) show that giving in a dictator game is inconsistent with distributional preferences as the giving rate drops when situational excuses for selfish behavior are provided. Our binary trust game closely follows their design. Only a preceding stage (safe outside option vs. enter the game) is added in order to introduce reciprocity. We find significantly lower rates of selfish choices in the trust baseline in comparison to our treatments that feature moral wiggle room manipulations and a dictator baseline. It seems that reciprocal behavior is not only due to people liking to reciprocate but also because they feel obliged to do so.

Keywords

Social preferencesPro-social behaviorExperimentsReciprocityMoral wiggle roomSelf-image concernsTrust game

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D80: General C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 2018 , pp. 779 - 792
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-017-9551-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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