Contact

Send us your feedback

Thank you for your feedback. An email has been sent to the ESRC support team.

An error occured whilst sending your feedback. Please review the problems below.

Money burning, envy and development: An experimental case study in Ethiopia

  • Start date: 01 August 2008
  • End date: 31 March 2010

Research in social sciences has increasingly highlighted the importance of envy and related social preferences (such as fairness, reciprocity and inequality aversion) in economic activities.  Satisfaction from a certain level of income will be lowered if individuals are strongly envious of richer people. Negative social preferences can also arrest innovation.

While anthropologists/sociologists have done significant research, economic research on envy and development is almost non-existent. This proposed research attempts to contribute towards filling this gap by using experimental games, sociological surveys, focus group discussions and already collected household survey data.  Newly collected data will be combined with existing panel household survey data covering the period 1994-2004.  In addition to examining the degree of envy among different ethnic groups, the study will also analyse whether it has significantly affected technological innovations in rural Ethiopia.  The fieldwork will be conducted in four rural villages of Ethiopia.  Using experimental data and real world decisions in relation to the same subjects, the project will examine the extent of envy in each sampled community and the corresponding differences amongst them.  The effect of envy on the degree and rate of technological adoption will also be analysed.


application/pdf Social envy at work

Author: Daniel John Zizzo Date: 15 March 2011 Conference paper/presentation

Grant holder

Professor Daniel John Zizzo

Programme name

None

Co - applicants

Dr Bereket Kebede

Grant amount

£65,456.40

Grant reference

RES-000-22-2840

Institution

University of East Anglia

Discipline

Economics

Grant type

Research Grant