treatment if the price of giving γg is high. Since pt > 1 joining is always optimal for any subject with consequentialist preferences. Hence an explanation for this finding must rest in process preferences, but it is not clear which.

## Introducing expectations

As discussed in Section III, the decision to join should partly depend on how subjects expect other participants to behave. If they expect others to burn or steal their endowment, they should be more reluctant to join a group in these two treatments. In contrast, if they expect to receive a lot from others, they should be more willing to join in the giving treatment. To investigate this idea, we re-estimate Table 6 with additional regressors for subjects’expectation of play by other participants, on its own and interacted with country dummies.

For this regression to be fully convincing, we must control for the subject’s intended play. To illustrate the issue, remember that people who intend to steal have an incentive to join in the stealing treatment. Now imagine that subjects who expect others to steal also steal a lot themselves. If we control for expectations but not own play, we may falsely assign to a high expectation of stealing by others a behavior that is in fact driven by an intention to steal from others. To correct for this, we construct a variable that summarizes each participant’s burning, stealing, and giving decisions made in Part 1. Since subjects receive no feedback about others’ play during the experiment, play in Part 1 should be a good proxy for intended play in Part 3.

Regression results are summarized in Table 7. We find no pattern regarding the stealing treatment. African subjects are slightly more likely to join in the giving treatment when they expect to receive more, as hypothesized earlier. But the effect is only significant for Kenya. Results are stronger in the burning treatment: joining is less likely for UK subjects who expect more burning, as would be predicted by theory. But the effect is absent among Kenyan and Ugandan subjects who, other things being equal, are much less likely to join in a burning treatment. We also find that UK subjects who burned a lot in Part 1 are less likely to join a burning treatment in Part 3. This effect, however, is reversed in the other two countries: subjects who burned more in Part 1 are more likely to join a group in the burning treatment. This latter finding is consistent with theoretical predictions, suggesting that their desire to burn partly motivates their decision to join.

In results not shown here, we also examine whether expectations of others’play help predict own play in Part 1 and Part 3 of the experiment. We find in the UK study population a strong association between own play and own expectation of others’play. This is true in all treatments and in both parts of the experiment although, in the two African study pools, this association is weaker.

# V. Conclusions

In this paper we have reported the results from a laboratory experiment conducted with different subject pools in Kenya, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. We test whether subjects are less likely to join a group when doing so increases their endowment but exposes them to one of three redistributive treatments: burning, stealing, or giving. We also test whether people in a group choose to destroy or steal the endowment of others, and whether they choose to give some of their endowment to others. The experimental setting precludes any feedback between subjects during and at the end of the experiment. Play is anonymous and subjects never play twice with the same subject within the same part of the experiment.

We find a lot of commonality across the three subject populations in terms of redistributive 14