Measuring the Welfare Effects of Shame and Pride

This paper was previously circulated under the title “The Deadweight Loss of Social Recognition.” We thank Ryan Johnson and Erik Daubert from the YMCA of the USA for their invaluable guidance and expertise in setting up our research partnership, as well as Maria-Alicia Serrano for her continuing support. We thank the YMCA of the Triangle Area, particularly Tony Campione, Mark Julian, Brian Spanner, and Janet Sprague, for their support in implementing our field experiment. We are indebted to Afras Sial for outstanding research assistance. We are grateful to David Birke, Stefano DellaVigna, and Devin Pope for generously sharing their experimental software. We thank Roland Bénabou, Leonardo Bursztyn, Gary Charness, Alain Cohn, Jonathan Davis, Stefano DellaVigna, Keith Ericson, Ray Fisman, Jana Gallus, David Gill, Alex Imas, John List, Fatemeh Momeni, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Na’ama Shenhav, Daniel Sznycer, Daniel Tannenbaum, Jessica Tracy, as well as conference and seminar participants for helpful comments. The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the YMCA of the USA, any other YMCA member association, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. Morrison thanks the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for support. Taubinsky thanks the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for research funding. The authors declare that they have no other relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper. The YMCA experiment was approved by University of Chicago IRB, #IRB15-1647; the charitable contribution experiments were approved by Boston University IRB, #5473X (BU) and University of California Berkeley IRB, #2020-01-1288.

• randomized controlled trials registry entry
• randomized controlled trials registry entry

• March 7, 2019
• August 13, 2020