The impact of social status on the formation of collaborative ties and effort provision: An experimental study

We study whether competition for social status induces higher effort provision and efficiency when individuals collaborate with their network neighbors. We consider a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose a costly collaborative effort and their network neighbors. They benefit from their neighbors’ effort and effort choices of direct neighbors are strategic complements. We introduce two types of social status in a 2 × 2 factorial design: (1) individuals receive monetary benefits for incoming links representing popularity; (2) they receive feedback on their relative payoff ranking within the group. We find that link benefits induce higher effort provision and strengthen the collaborative ties relative to the Baseline treatment without social status. In contrast, the ranking information induces lower effort as individuals start competing for higher ranking. Overall, we find that social status has no significant impact on the number of links in the network and the efficiency of collaboration in the group.