Procedural Preferences in Competitive Environments Lab-in-The-Field Evidence from Madagascar1

Under which circumstances do individuals engage in unfair competition practices, and what consequences do these forms of misdeeds have on prosociality? Employing an artefactual field experiment in Madagascar, we show that 39 percent of participants engage in unfair competitive practices. However, they do not always use this to increase their payoffs. We find that individuals are equally likely to engage in Spying -revise the decision after learning about the payoffs- and Sabotaging -overrule the competitor's decision supporting the use of utilitarian moral principles. When advantageous interactions are allowed in a known network, altruism decreases but trust and trustworthiness do not change systematically. Exposure to higher criminal environments is related to more exploitative behavior in the game, indicating persistent and long-term effects of delinquency.