The economic value of a meeting: Evidence from an investment game experiment

Abstract

The decrease of social distance between subjects and between subjects and experimenters facilitates the deviation from purely selfish behavior in different experimental contexts. Even though the effects of social distance reduction are widely documented, little is known about subjects’ preferences for anonymity, and in particular about the willingness to remove it if they are given the opportunity. In a variant of the investment game we give players the opportunity to decrease the social distance and investigate three main issues: a) how many subjects decide to remove anonymity when this is allowed; b) how this choice is associated with their behavior in the game; c) why should rational subjects opt for removing anonymity. Evidence shows that a significant number of subjects (43.5%) expects to obtain a positive utility by meeting their counterpart and they are ready to risk and/or lose money to get this utility.