The impact of social status on the formation of collaborative ties and effort provision: An experimental study

Gergely Horvath, Mofei Jia*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We study whether competition for social status induces higher effort provision and efficiency when individuals collaborate with their network neighbors. We consider a laboratory experiment in which individuals choose a costly collaborative effort and their network neighbors. They benefit from their neighbors’ effort and effort choices of direct neighbors are strategic complements. We introduce two types of social status in a 2 × 2 factorial design: (1) individuals receive monetary benefits for incoming links representing popularity; (2) they receive feedback on their relative payoff ranking within the group. We find that link benefits induce higher effort provision and strengthen the collaborative ties relative to the Baseline treatment without social status. In contrast, the ranking information induces lower effort as individuals start competing for higher ranking. Overall, we find that social status has no significant impact on the number of links in the network and the efficiency of collaboration in the group.

Original languageEnglish
Article number102298
JournalJournal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics
Volume113
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

Keywords

  • Collaboration
  • Efficiency
  • Experiment
  • Network formation
  • Social status

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The impact of social status on the formation of collaborative ties and effort provision: An experimental study'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this