We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to measures obtained from a field experiment with a population of participants who face a social dilemma in their daily lives (i.e., team production), we do find strong links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the stock of social preferences evolves endogeously with respect to how widely team production is utilized.
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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
1697.
Find related papers by JEL classification: C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments D21 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior D24 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Production; Capital and Total Factor Productivity; Capacity H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects M54 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting - - Personnel Economics - - - Labor Management Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Social Norms and Social Capital; Social Networks Economic Anthropology
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Glenn W. Harrison & John A. List, 2004.
"Field Experiments,"
Journal of Economic Literature,
American Economic Association, vol. 42(4), pages 1009-1055, December.
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