Prosocial Behavior, Social Interaction and Development: Experimental Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract: Paper 1. Funding a New Bridge in Rural Vietnam: A Field Experiment on Conditional Cooperation and Default Contributions The ability to provide public goods is essential for economic and social development, yet there is very limited empirical evidence regarding contributions to a real local public good in developing countries. This paper analyzes a field experiment where 200 households in rural Vietnam could make real contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge. In particular, we study the role of two kinds of social influence: i) conditional cooperation, i.e., that people may be more willing to cooperate if others do, and ii) the effects of the default alternative, i.e., that people are influenced by the default alternative presented to them in the choice situation. We find significant and substantial effects of both kinds of influence. For example, by either giving the subjects the additional information that one of the most common contributions by others is 100,000 dong (a relatively low contribution) or introducing a zero-contribution default alternative, the average contribution decreases by about 20% compared to the baseline case. Paper 2. Are Social Preferences Stable over Time? We use a combination of two natural experiments and one field experiment to measure people’s prosocial behavior in terms of voluntary money and labor time contributions to an archetypical public good – a bridge – in rural Vietnam, at three different points in time from 2005 to 2010. Since the experiments are far apart in time, potentially confounding effects of moral licensing and moral cleansing are presumably small, if at all existent. We find a strong positive and statistically significant correlation between voluntary contributions in these experiments, whether correcting for other covariates or not. This result suggests that prosocial preferences are at least partly stable over long periods of time. Paper 3. Conditional Cooperation and Disclosure in Developing Countries Understanding the patterns behind people’s voluntary contributions to public goods is crucial for the broader issues of economic and social development. By using the experimental design by Fischbacher et al. (2001), we investigate distributions of contribution types in developing countries (Colombia and Vietnam) and compare our findings with those previously found in developed countries. We also investigate the effect of introducing disclosure of contribution. Our experiments show that, on average, the distributions of contribution types are similar both in the two countries and compared to previous findings, except for free-riders, and overall remain unaffected by disclosure of contributions. Paper 4. Social Capital and Private Adaptation to Climate Change: Evidence from the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam Farmers in developing countries often face capital constraints in adapting to climate change. Can farmers’ own social capital be utilized to facilitate the adaptation? This study uses four components of social capital – formal institutions, informal institutions, trust, and cooperativeness – to examine whether social capital is systematically linked to adaptation to climate change. The results suggest, in general, that social capital at the individual level does not affect farmers’ private adaptation to climate change. Yet, some forms of social capital are significantly associated with the choice of some particular adaptation measures. Paper 5. Are Vietnamese Farmers Concerned with their Relative Position in Society? This paper examines the attitude towards relative position or status among rural households in Vietnam. On average, respondents show rather weak preferences for relative position. Possible explanations are the emphasis on the importance of equality and that villagers are very concerned with how the local community perceives their actions. We also investigate what influences the concern for relative position and find, among other things, that if anyone from the household is a member of the Peoples Committee then the respondent is more concerned with the relative position.