Files
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the relationship between prosociality and economic behavior. The study of prosociality (and related concepts like altruism) has long been intertwined with broader concerns about the accumulation and circulation of material resources, from the empirical literature on the management of common pool resources and public goods, to the theoretical literature on social dilemmas. The chapters of this dissertation shed new light on the relationship between prosociality and economic behavior through empirical studies and mathematical modelling. The introductory chapter begins with a theoretical critique of what I call "consequentialist prosociality", the conception of prosociality that is most commonly used in the literature: actions taken by one set of agents that cause another set of agents to experience some benefit. After exploring the paradoxes of this approach, I propose that we reconceptualize prosociality as a set of local and dynamic relations between persons, relations that involve the extension of an agent's self-concern to include other agents. This reconceptualization lays the groundwork for the remaining three chapters. The first chapter uses network data collected from 75 villages in Karnataka, a state in southwestern India, to assess the relationship between individual villager-level bank account ownership and the likelihood that villagers report ties that cross caste boundaries. The results of this chapter provides evidence that more market-integrated villagers are more likely to establish relations across caste boundaries. The second chapter contains the results of a pilot study for a social exchange experiment: I randomly assign Prolific participants to participate in two forms of dyadic exchange (reciprocal and negotiated) and then randomly re-pair them to play an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Given that different forms of economic organization differentially prioritize these two forms of dyadic exchange, the results of the full experiment will give us some indication of what mechanisms may drive the relationship between changes in economic organization and changes in social patterns of trust and cooperation. Finally, the third chapter contains an analysis of a formal model of social preferences. I prove that if agents in a group can have utility functions that weigh the outcomes of themselves and other group members, and if those weights sum to unity and obey transitive closure, then certain structural properties of the matrix of weights lead to sociologically interesting equilibrium distributions of other-regard in the group. All of these chapters push forward a research agenda for prosociality that emphasizes the mechanisms that drive local patterns of concern, trust, and cooperation.