Norms of Cooperation, Trust, Altruism, and Fairness: Evidence from Lab Experiments on Pakistani Students

Abstract

A rich area of economic research focuses on the role of controlled experiments to understand interactions between agents and agents’ own deepseeded preferences as they pertain to pro-social behavior. Four of the most common games—the prisoner’s dilemma, and the trust, ultimatum, and dictator games—have been used both in laboratory and field settings, and with student and nonstudent participants. Cardenas and Carpenter (2008) have compiled evidence for these four games that has been collected from behavioral experiments conducted in the US and a number of developing countries. In this paper, we wish to add to the existing evidence by presenting the results of lab experiments carried out on a population of economics students at a university in Lahore.