Addressing the Enigma of the Gift: The Role of Social Relations in Gift Exchange

2016-09-23

2016-10-31

Workers’ productivity (total number of characters, total number of characters inputted, number of references, number of typos).

Following the standard field-experiment design in gift exchange, we recruit subjects to build the electronic library of a professor in a Chilean University. Subjects older than 18 from 13 different high-education institutions were recruited as workers for a 6-hour work of inputting academic cites on a software tracking their performance without their knowledge. The job consisted of an initial training session and four work shifts of 50 minutes each with three coffee breaks and a half-an-hour lunch. The task was advertised a one time job offering the market wage.

Workers were randomly assigned to one of six treatments varying whether a gift was granted or not and the existence and strength of the social relationship with the employer. In particular, we have a 3x2 design, with and without a gift and three different levels of social relation: No-Social relation, Weak-Social relation and Strong-Social relation.

To understand and build the social relation between the parties, we follow the anthropological and psychological literatures. Since Mauss (1954), anthropologists have claimed that recipients will not interpret all monetary transfers as a gift. For a monetary transfer to be perceived as gift, it must be the case that the social relation between the parties is close and intimate. For a working definition of closeness and intimacy, we follow the psychological model by Reis and Shaver (1988), defining intimacy as a process that ``starts when a person expresses personal feelings or information to another […] to what the listener responds supportively and empathetically”. Based on this idea, we create a strict protocol that tightly controls the interaction between the professor commissioning the electronic library and the workers. The No-Social relation treatment replicates the standard gift-exchange design were the employer (in this case the professor) commissioning the work is not present in any moment but his/her name is mentioned at the moment the gift is granted. In the Weak-Social relation the professor is present at the start of the training period and limits the interaction to subjects to being introduced to workers by the RA conducting the training. In the Strong-Social relation the employer builds a social relationship with the workers by engaging in conversation with them following a protocol tailored by Reis and Shaver (1988)’s definition of intimacy. The protocol was carefully designed to avoid workers making inferences about their productivity from their interaction with the professor. The employer-employee interaction takes place in the first and second work shifts, the latter taking place half an hour before the research assistant grants the gift in the Gift treatments.

Because social relationships are the core of this paper null hypothesis, research assistants were not assigned by rooms, but rather by task, in order to make sure that all other (potentially relevant) social relationships are held constant across treatments.

Once all the data is collected, we will contact subjects by email for them to participate in a survey measuring their satisfaction with the task, payment and gift (if correspond), their level of perceived closeness to the employer (following the closeness measures validated in Gatcher, Starmer and Tufano (2015)) and their social preferences.

Randomization at the time of recruitment. As interested students contacted the research assistant in charge of recruiting, they were randomly offered two possibles dates to work, each with two possible time schedules. We did not randomly assign people to a give date and time as that affects the external validity of the study.

Worker level.

No

13

Around 200-250 workers (actual number will depend on the amount of no shows).

40 to 50 workers by each treatment.

There is not similar study to make power calculations.