Preferences for living in homogenous communities and cooperation: a new methodological approach combining the hedonic price model and a field experiment

The literature on the hedonic price approach applied to housing highlights the existence of natives’ preferences against living in high-dense immigrant urban areas. At the same time, empirical and experimental evidence show that ethnic fragmentation reduces cooperation at the community level. Mainly because of the difficulty to measure cooperation at the level of neighborhood, the correlation between these two phenomena is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose to investigate this issue by combining the hedonic price approach and a framed field experiment that allows us to collect a measure of cooperation at the neighborhood level. We show how this methodology may be implemented by carrying out a pilot study for the city of Milan. The purpose is to pave the way for further research aiming at disentangling between alternative explanations of natives’ preferences for living in homogeneous communities.