Description:
This paper investigates the effect of poverty and good intentions
on dictator game giving. Previous experimental studies in which information
was supplied to dictators about recipients have shown that
dictator giving increases overall in this context. We develop a new
design of standard informed dictator games with three main variants:
1) three recipients are used instead of one; 2) dictators are informed
that their recipients are poor; 3) dictators give donations in the form
of medicines instead of money. We have found that 46% of the experimental
subjects (dictators) give the full amount of money (100% of
the endowment) in the ‘poverty’ treatment, while in the ‘medicines’
treatment this percentage increases to 72%. Such extremely generous
behavior has seldom been observed in the previous literature on
dictator games.