Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States: Comment

摘要

There is a growing literature showing that social comparison can significantly affect consumption patterns, labor supply, savings, bargaining, cooperation, competition, and other kinds of economic behavior. Surprisingly, however, few contributions investigate risk taking in a social context. One recent and notable exception is Iris Bohnet et al. (2008; see also Bohnet and Richard Zeckhauser 2004), who investigate risk taking in one-person choice problems, and two-person trust and dictator games, across six countries. Their major finding is that people are less willing to take a risk when the source of the risk is another person rather than nature, a phenomenon they term "betrayal aversion." Yet, in their data, social comparison per se does not seem to affect risk taking. In particular, in moving from the one-person choice context to the social context of the dictator game (where the chooser's payoffs are the same in both games), extending the risk to a recipient should have decreased risk taking if choosers are motivated by inequality aversion, or increased risk taking if they are motivated by altruism or efficiency motives-but in fact there is no difference. Bohnet et al. (2008) speculate that the different social motives might have canceled out, or that social comparisons are not so important in their environment.