Social Identity and Group Contests

Social identity has been shown to successfully enhance cooperation and effort in cooperation and coordination games. Little is known about the causal effect of social identity on the propensity to engage in group conflict. In this paper we explore theoretically and experimentally whether social identity increases investments in group contests. We show theoretically that increasedsocial identity with the own group implies higher investments in Tullock contests. Empirically we find that induced social identity does increase group closeness but does not increase conflict investments.