Power to Ignore: An Experimental Study

Recent studies in experimental economics have documented that communication encourages individuals' altruism and charitable giving in various contexts. Building upon these findings, this paper incorporates and studies the influence of power differences in communication on giving behavior. We conducted a variant of dictator game experiments where a dictator is explicitly allowed to ignore a recipient's message before deciding the split. Power differences between players varied across different treatments on provision of information regarding the dictator’s reception of the message and framing on the property right of the endowment. We find evidence that dictators tend to be more generous toward recipients' messages when recipients cannot verify whether dictators have read the message. We interpret these behaviors as a demonstration of psychological mechanisms of individuals being more generous to less powerful counterparts. However, recipient behaviors imply that they have failed at anticipating dictators behaviors, as they asked for more when they had more power and asked less otherwise.