16:00 - 17:45
Parallel track
Room: Aula
Endogenous social reference points
Julien Senn 1, Jan Schmitz 2, Christian Zehnder 3
1 University of Zurich, Zurich
2 ETH Zurich, Zurich
3 University of Lausanne, Lausanne

Daily life provides individuals with many occasions to compare themselves to others. For example, neighbors compare their houses, athletes compare their performances, coworkers compare their incomes, and academics compare their publications. Such comparisons can have important effects: they might alter utility and ultimately affect behavior. Previous studies have shown that social comparisons matter in settings as diverse as consumption decision, effort choices (Bandiera et al., 2010), happiness (Clark & Oswald, 1996), risk taking (Schwerter, WP), financial decisions (Bursztyn et al., 2014), and social preferences (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999), amongst others. A key ingredient of such social comparisons is the determination of the relevant comparison group (i.e. the social reference point). In most domains, individuals have the chance to compare themselves to a large variety of individuals. But are all comparisons equally relevant? Most likely not. A casual marathon runner, for example, will probably care more about the time achieved by his best friend than by the time achieved by professional runners. Similarly, workers are probably more affected by learning the salary of their coworkers than by learning the salary of the CEO of another company. To this point, much of the evidence on peer effects and social reference points has focused on environments in which peers are exogenously assigned to individuals. However, in many settings individuals have the opportunity to actively choose whom to compare to. For example, a casual marathon runner can choose to compare to his friends and not look at the time achieved by professional runners. Even in settings in which it might appear that individuals do not explicitly single out a peer, the individual can still choose who to attend to and ignore how other individuals behave. At the workplace for example, young professionals often pick one coworker as a role model, and focus much less on how other coworkers perform.


Reference:
Th-Social comparison-1
Session:
Social comparison
Presenter/s:
Julien Senn
Room:
Aula
Date:
Thursday, 2 May
Time:
16:00 - 17:45
Session times:
16:00 - 17:45