Compassion and envy in El Salvador, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and Philippines: Evidence from Lab Experiments

Abstract

We study the distributive preferences of a sample of students deciding how to split a pie in a dictator game experiment. Subjects (N>2500, n>200 per country; 51% women) play the role of dictators in six binary games (randomized order), where one option is always an equal split, and the other varies with greater or lesser benefits for the dictator (Corgnet et al., 2015). According to Fehr and Schmidt (1999), compassionate subjects are those who benefit their partner even at the cost of their own gains, while envious subjects are those who will incur a cost to ensure that their partner does not earn more than they do.

The six decisions allow us to estimate both compassion and envy in a sample of subjects from El Salvador, Honduras, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and Philippines (N=1415). We compare these findings with a sample from four Eurozone countries (Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, and Spain, N=1282). Compared to the Europeans, we find that subjects (both men and women) from all developing countries exhibit stronger social preferences (higher levels of compassion and envy), but we do not find consistent differences among them. Furthermore, women are significantly more envious in all developing countries.