Looking for a Report Templates? Download it for free!

and were reminded not to reveal their decisions. At the end of the study, the envelopes

with the bands were randomly and anonymously donated to other children from other

participating classes (but only after those other children had completed their study; thus,

each child was once a giver and once a receiver, but children were not aware that they

would also be receivers). !

Each classroom was randomly assigned to either the private or public treatment, and this

assignment was held constant throughout the experiment

. In the public treatment,

children were informed at the beginning of each game that at the end of each game all

children’s names and their individual decisions (i.e., bands donated in the Dictator Game)

would be written on the blackboard for every child to see. However, in the private

treatment, children’s decisions were not revealed (see Appendix for more details). To

keep these two treatments as similar as possible, we listed the children’s names on the

blackboard in both treatments; however, in the Private Treatment, we did not report the

children’s decisions, but only whether they participated in the activity.

At the end of the Dictator Game, without warning, we asked the children to fill out a

sheet of paper depicting a table and 5 chairs (that we called the “Seating Map”)

. Each

child was required to write his/her name on the chair on the head of the table and (up to)

five other names of other children in the class that s/he would like to have seated close to

him/her (from closer to farther). We informed the children that the names they reported

would be kept confidential and that neither the parents nor the teachers or other friends

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

their classmates or with the experimenter (who effectively acted as a silly band bank). Such exchanges

were uncommon. Finally, note that while differences in the desirability of silly bands might increase the

overall level of sharing, this effect would be common across treatments and thus cannot impact our

conclusions regarding the effect of popularity or age on generosity.

The entire experiment was conducted over 2 weeks. In this paper, we only consider data from the

sessions conducted in week 1.

When eliciting the network in the Public and Private treatments, one difference is the fact that children in

treatment Public were informed about the choices of their classmates. If there is a treatment effect on

network elicitation (say, for example, in Public, children’s names are associated with how many silly bands

they donate, then the more generous and popular kids might get more votes as Friend 1 and/or Friend 2),

we should expect differences in vote distributions. However, as can be seen from Figure A2.1 to Figure

A2.5 in the Appendix, we find no evidence that the order in which the experiment was conducted impacted

the distribution of votes for the most popular children (upper quartile of the popularity distribution) across

treatments (K-S test, p > 0.50 for all cases).

Beware Of Popular Kids Bearing Gifts: A Framed Field Experiment - Jignan Chen, Daniel Houser, Natalia Montinari, And Marco Piovesan (Interdisciplinary Center For Economic Science, George Mason University) Page 10

Related Articles

Related forms

Related Categories