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Gender differences in giving in the Dictator Game: the role of reluctant altruism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

David Klinowski
David Klinowski*
Affiliation:
Santiago Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Department of Economics, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
*
e-mail: dklinowski@gmail.com
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Abstract

The Dictator Game has been a helpful tool to study whether men or women are more generous. But recent work suggests that motivations other than generosity also influence behavior in this game. Image concerns and expectations management may cause dictators to “give reluctantly”; that is, to share money with the recipient if asked to, but to renege on their gifts if they can do so without being detected. We provide evidence from two separate experiments that females are more likely than males to give reluctantly in the Dictator Game. After accounting for retraction of gifts, males and females transfer similar amounts to the recipient in expectation. The results suggest that gender differences in non-payoff-related motivations may play a role in producing gender differences in giving in the Dictator Game.

Keywords

GenderDictator GameReluctant altruismC91J16D64
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 4 , Issue 2 , December 2018 , pp. 110 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0058-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This research was supported in part by a grant from the Science of Philanthropy Initiative. I also would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor, Nikos Nikiforakis, for comments that greatly improved this paper.

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