It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: Self-Interest, Social Justice, and Mass Attitudes toward Market Transition

Abstract

To explore systematic differences in economic reasoning and what might account for them, we investigate how sociocultural conditions affect transitions to market economies in the West African country of Benin. We probe the importance of several factors: basic economic norms, utility maximization behavior, individual-level personal capital, and individual-level social capital. The evidence, based on experiments embedded in an opinion survey, indicates that Beninese citizens widely share commitments to the basic foundations of economic interaction, e.g., property rights. The nature of social capital varies across cultural and political contexts and accounts for cross-contextual variation in the costs associated with cooperative behavior and in utility maximization behavior.

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