Putting a premium on altruism: A social discounting experiment with South African university students.

ABSTRACT: This paper reports on a social discounting experiment conducted with university students in South Africa. In line with other social discounting task experiments, participants identify target individuals at different degrees of intimacy in their social network and then make 10 choices involving sums of money for themselves or their targets. For an altruism premium to exist, senders' donations to recipients should be positive, statistically and economically significant, and independent of relationship closeness. We hypothesize that in addition to the altruism premium for kin documented in the literature, there may be other premia for family in general and for partners and friends. We find that, apart from the "kinship" premium, there is a sizeable "intimacy" premium, which together translate

SUBMITTER: Booysen F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5903621 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature