Social Distance, Cooperation and Other Regarding Preferences: A New Approach Based on the Theory of Relational Goods

The paper is divided in six sections. In the second section we provide a short survey of the literature on relational goods. In the third section we describe the experimental design of the two experiments presented in Becchetti et al. (2007) and Becchetti, Degli Antoni and Faillo (2009) (hereafter also B2007 and B2009). In the fourth section we discuss the hypotheses on the effect of relational goods on players’ behaviour in the two experiments. In the fifth section we discuss the main findings. The sixth section concludes.