Exp Econ (2015) 18:302–313 DOI 10.1007/s10683-014-9403-2 ORIGINAL PAPER Gender differences in the dictator experiment: evidence from the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi Binglin Gong · Huibin Yan · Chun-Lei Yang Received: 30 December 2012 / Revised: 6 April 2014 / Accepted: 8 April 2014 / Published online: 6 May 2014 © Economic Science Association 2014 Abstract In this study, we report experimental results on the dictator decision collected in two neighboring ethnic minority groups, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, in southwestern China. We follow the double-blind protocol as in Eckel and Grossman (in Handbook of experimental economics results, 1998), who find that women in the U.S. donate more than men. We find this pattern reversed in the Mosuo society and find no gender difference in the Yi society. This is highly suggestive that societal factors play an important role in shaping the gender dif- ferences in pro-social behavior such as dictator giving. Keywords Gender difference · Ethnic difference · Dictator game · Matrilineal society · Field experiment JEL Classification C93 · D03 · Z1 · J15 · J16 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10683- 014-9403-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. B. Gong (&) School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China e-mail:
[email protected];
[email protected] H. Yan Economics Department, UC Santa Cruz, Engineering 2, 401, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA e-mail:
[email protected] C.-L. Yang Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei 115, Taiwan e-mail:
[email protected] 123 Gender differences in the dictator experiment 303 1 Introduction Gender differences in social preferences like altruism, inequality aversion, trust and cooperation are salient issues in social science studies for their relevance in cooperation, public good provision, voting, and the labor market, among other domains.