Oxana Bondarenko Presented the Report on 'The Effect of Movies on Pro-social Behavior'

On December 08 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE.  Oxana Bondarenko  (CEFIR) spoke on 'The Effect of Movies on Pro-social Behavior'.

Abstract:
We investigate the effect of film media on trust and reciprocity using an incentivized experiment. The subjects were shown one of several movie fragments before the experiment. We find that watching a movie has an effet on her strategies in a trust game, in particular, on the fraction returned by the receiver. The magnitude of the effect depends on the movie, and on the subject's survey-measured social norms and altruism. Our findings suggest that mass media has a significant effect on trust and reciprocity, and that this effect is mediated by the person's values.


joint work with Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, Alexei Zakharov