Centre for Development Economics
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
by
Ritwik Banerjee
( IIM-Bangalore)
(Friday, February 14, 2025, at 10:15 AM IST
Venue: Amex Room
Abstract:-
Intolerance, in its various forms, undermines the fabric of a cohesive society by breeding division and animosity among individuals or groups based on differences in beliefs, identities, or ideologies. In this paper, we study whether people are willing to pay to block the views of others that they do not concur with. We design an experiment where participants are exposed to a series of vignette-based decisions and reveal their personal and social appropriateness norms. The vignettes are randomly assigned; thus, some participants are exposed to vignettes consistent with their views, while others see vignettes inconsistent with their views. Subsequently, the participants reveal their a) willingness to pay to prevent the spread of a view; b) willingness to split an amount with people with different personal norms. Our results show that people are willing to pay a positive amount to prevent the spread of views, which increases if the views are inconsistent with their personal norms. Our construct of intolerance predicts a context-free measure of intolerance and an incentivized willingness to block consequential posters incongruous with one’s political beliefs in the 2024 US election.