Séminaire NANCY – Marie Claire Villeval (CNRS, GATE)

Détails de l'événement :

“Homophily, Peer Effects and Dishonesty”

Abstract: If individuals tend to behave like their peers, is it because of conformity, that is, the preference of people to align behavior with the behavior of their peers, homophily, that is, the tendency of people to bond with similar others, or both? We address this question in the context of ethical dilemmas. Using a peer effect model allowing for homophily, we designed a real-effort laboratory experiment in which individuals could misreport their performance to earn more. Participants initially worked in isolation and then, depending on the condition, they were assigned peers at random or they could select their peers based on a signal on their past (dis-)honesty. Our results reveal the presence of conformity on lying and of homophily in the selection of peers, but only among participants who were behaving dishonestly in isolation.The evidence also suggests that there is no self-selection bias in the peer effect estimates due to homophily. Finally, the size of peer effects is similar when peers with similar characteristics are randomly assigned and when they are chosen by individuals, showing no effect of the link strength.