The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next regular seminar, which will be held in Moscow (Krivokolenny Pereulok, 3, room 3-333) on October, 11 at 17-00 p.m. Alexei Zakharov (Senior Research Fellow, International Laboratory for Experimental and Behavioural Economics) and Oxana Bondarenko (Postgraduate Student, HSE) will deliver a report “Social status and information transmission”.

We study the effect of unequal social status on information dissemination and social learning. 

For each pair of subjects, we induce the asymmetry in social status with a dictator game. The individuals then make repeated attempts to guess the underlying state of the world. 

We show that asymmetry in social status leads to an asymmetry in social learning, with high-status individuals having more influence on the actions of low-status individuals. This result is present both in a model with two Bayesian rational individuals (where the low-status individual is assumed to have a preference to conformity toward the high-status individual), and in an incentivized laboratory experiment, where asymmetry in status is induced by making the subjects play a dictator game. We also find that social learning is strongly influenced by both risk preferences and socialization, with more risk-averse (and less socialized) individuals more likely to learn from the actions of others.  

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is English.

Videoconference with St. Petersburg office of the LCSR (room 303, 55-2, Sedova st.) will be provided. Guests from St. Petersburg are invited to make a request for a pass to the building to Olesya Volchenko (ovolchenko@hse.ru) by 12 am of the seminar’s day.

Guests from Moscow are invited to make a request for a pass to the building to Tereza Tonyan (ttonyan@hse.ru) by 12 am of the seminar’s day.

Also after the seminar a videotape will be put up after the summary of the presentation.