Poverty in dictator games:: Awakening solidarity

This paper investigates the effect of recipient poverty and medicines on dictator game giving. We develop a new design with three variants: (1) subjects do not know they are participating in an experiment; (2) dictators receive three EURO 5 bills instead of EURO 15 coins; (3) three recipients are used instead of one. We performed three different treatments regarding the information about recipients: (i) no-info condition; (ii) poverty: dictators were informed that their recipients were poor; (iii) medicines: donations were given in the form of medicines instead of money. We found that 46 percent of the subjects gave the full endowment in the 'poverty' treatment, while in the 'medicines' treatment this percentage increased to 72 percent. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.