| "For sending me a papaya,I will return for a piece of jade",gift exchange is an important social phenomenon,which widely exists in human society.Gift giving behavior triggers the recipient's sense of obligation to reciprocate the gift.Why do gifts trigger reciprocity? Most of the existing experimental studies focused on the highly simplified environment of bilateral gift exchange.In reality,gift exchange often involves multilateralism.For example,in third-party procurement,a party with purchasing decision-making authority may receive gifts from multiple bidders.These multi-party gifts often imply a profit-seeking motivation through the gift.So,when the simple bilateral gift exchange is extended to the competitive environment of multilateral gifts,could gifts still pass goodwill steadily and trigger reciprocity? And how will this multilateral gift competition environment with gift-giving opportunities affect the overall efficiency of society?The paper was based on the exploration of the internal mechanism of reciprocity in multilateral gift exchange.Two research conjectures were proposed.First,the difference in gift benefits would affect reciprocal behavior.Second,the opportunity cost of gift giving would affect reciprocal behavior.In this paper,we construted a social preference model,and designed an experiment to vertify the model.In the experiments,we designed a multilateral gift exchange game with two givers and one recipient.By controlling the probabilistic loss of gift benefits and the opportunity cost of gifting behaviors separately,the effects of these two variables on reciprocal behaviors were studied.Furthermore,by setting up two types of decision-making environments with and without externalities,we explored whether the existence of negative externalities will affect the reciprocal behavior in multilateral gift exchange.Finally,we measured the risk aversion tendency,pure altruism tendency and reciprocity tendency of the participants to test whether the experimental results were stable in the heterogeneity of individual social preferences.The experimental results were basically consistent with the inferences in the theoretical model.The research found that in the environment of multilateral gifts,the phenomenon of gift exchange still existed irrespective of whether or not reciprocal behavior will cause negative externalities.On the one hand,the difference in gift benefits caused by exogenous shocks significantly affected the reciprocity of gift recipients.In the experiment,it is manifested that the recipient shows more favoritism towards the gift giver who brings higher gift benefits.The reason behind this was that when the gift recipient faced a gift with a higher benefit,he felt that the gift behavior is stronger in kindness,even if the difference in gift benefits caused by the exogenous shock was public information.The results of this study remained robust in terms of the heterogeneity of individual social preferences.On the other hand,the opportunity cost of gift giving behavior affected the recipient's reciprocal behavior,especially for individuals with higher reciprocity tendency or higher risk aversion tendency.On this basis,we further designed another experiment,which aimed to conduct a more comprehensive inquiry into the negative externalities in the multilateral gift exchange environment with competitive characteristics.Specifically,in this paper,by comparing the changes in the behavioral decision-making of the gift givers and recipients in the competition in environment with or without gift-giving opportunitiy,we could explore whether their behavior would be affected by gift giving opportunity and leads to a loss of social efficiency.The final experimental results showed that the negative externalities in multilateral gift exchanges are not only due to the distortion of the fairness of the recipient 's behavior,but also from the crowding effect of gift-giving opportunities to the legitimate behaviour that was originally beneficial to society. |
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