Project 1: Social identity, taste bias and under provisioning of public goods; Project 2: Discrimination in fairness – Evidence from an online labor market

Abstract

Data shows that public good provision in India decreases with an increase in caste based fractionalization. This pattern indicates that if a society is more fractured i.e. the share of various social groups in the population get closer to each other, public goods become more and more scarce. While past research documents this association, the causal interpretation and the deeper mechanisms driving the result is an open question. This project aims to plug this gap by identifying the precise causal connection between caste fractionalization in India and under provisioning of public goods. Our hypothesis is that the under provisioning of public good is driven, in part, by associative distaste emanating from sharing. To give an example, suppose people from different castes need to coordinate to build a well. In a more fractured village, people may be less likely to coordinate and build the well because they have a distaste for sharing the public good with outgroup members. This form of associative distaste is markedly different from free riding, the dominant theme examined in the context of public good. Our study aims to disentangle all possible alternative explanations by writing down a structural model and running a carefully designed experiment to identify distaste arising from sharing a common resource with the outgroup. In doing so, we will also examine if punishment mechanism can be used to sustain high levels of public good and how punishment as a strategy is deployed by different caste groups belonging to different levels of social hierarchy.