Study title

Background:Improvements in the upward social mobility of a group or society can paradoxically lead to more frustration (relative deprivation) among its members. At present, there is little understanding of the conditions under which this paradox occurs. Raymond Boudon created a game-theoretic model of relative deprivation that can be used to derive predictions for these conditions. We extend his model, and test it in a laboratory experiment.The Experiment:144 subjects participated in one of 7 sessions conducted in the winter of 2017/2018. They were randomly placed in an individual cubicle, so they could not see, or communicate with, each other. Through written instructions, they were informed that they would play a competition game in groups of six. They were also informed that there were six rounds of the competition game in total, and that the groups would be randomly reassigned every round. The game is as follows. In every round, there are a number of rewards to be allocated among the group. Subjects receive a budget that they can invest to participate in a competition for these rewards, or they can keep it and not participate in the competition. The rewards are first allocated to the persons who participated in the competition. If in a round the number of investors exactly equals the number of rewards, all investors will get a reward minus their invested budget, and all persons that did not participate in the competition (the non-investors) do not get a reward but keep their budget. If there are more investors than rewards, not every investor can get a reward. The rewards will then be randomly allocated over the investors. The rest of the investors will not receive a reward, despite having spent their budget to participate in the competition. Boudon suggested that these losing investors are disadvantaged compared to some of their referent others, namely the winning investors, and can therefore be considered relatively deprived. If there are fewer investors...