Abstract
We examine the impact of religious identity and village-level religious fragmentation on behavior in Tullock contests. We report on a series of two-player Tullock contest experiments conducted on a sample of 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural West Bengal, India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players and the degree of religious fragmentation in the village where subjects reside. Our main finding is that the effect of social identity is small and inconsistent across the two religious groups in our study. While we find small but statistically significant results in line with our hypotheses in the Hindu sample, we find no statistically significant effects in the Muslim sample. This is in contrast to evidence from Chakravarty et al. (2016), who report significant differences in cooperation levels in prisoners’ dilemma and stag hunt games, both in terms of village composition and identity. We attribute this to the fact that social identity may have a more powerful effect on cooperation than on conflict.
Highlights
We often observe agents competing with each other to receive or get access to resources in a wide variety of economic and social situations
The results are quite different to those in the Muslim sample: no coefficient other than the constant is statistically significant, which indicates there are no significant differences in average expenditure between Muslims with certainty (M-M) and MIX or H-M
The main finding of our experiment is that the average expenditure by subjects in our experiment appears to be sensitive to the identity of their match, or to the type of village in which they reside only in the case of the Hindu sample
Summary
We often observe agents competing with each other to receive or get access to resources in a wide variety of economic and social situations. People’s preference for their own social group and or their bias against other social groups could lead greater competition and increased likelihood for conflict To this effect, we investigate what impact (if any) religious identities have on the likelihood of conflict over a resource using a lab-in-the-field experiment conducted in West Bengal, India. In order to understand the effect of identity and social fragmentation on conflict and competition, we study the Tullock contest [19, 20]. In this game, each competing party can spend part of its wealth to increase the probability of obtaining a resource. We find no statistically significant effects in the Muslim sample
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