Sevias Guvuriro, Winter 2022 UMAPS scholar, was promoted to associate professor at the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa in October 2022. Guvuriro, as well as many other faculty members from South African universities, started his career as a lecturer and was later promoted to senior lecturer. He is excited to join the professoriate in economics, specifically behavioral development economics.
I highly appreciate the UMAPS program for its role in my promotion. When applying for a promotion at UFS, faculty members are evaluated in four areas: teaching and learning; research; engaged scholarship, and leadership and administration. My participation in the UMAPS program came at an opportune time as it highly strengthened my research and engaged scholarship. Furthermore, UMAPS gave me the opportunity to meet and interact with world leaders in my area of interest—behavioral and experimental economics—during my time at the University of Michigan, says Guvuriro.
On November 10-13, 2022, Guvuriro, with the encouragement of his U-M host Professor Erin Krupka, participated in the 2022 North-American Economic Science Association Conference in Santa Barbara, California. The annual event brings together distinguished behavioral and experimental economists in the global north, and Guvuriro had the opportunity to present his research, “Social Discounting in a Symmetric Giving and Taking Frame: An Artefactual Field Experiment with Young South African Adults,” at this year’s conference. In the study, Guvuriro experimentally employs isomorphically equivalent designs for the taking and giving dictator game and acknowledges that this practice is the most popular workhorse for experimental and behavioral economists and in their study of altruism.
By introducing a social distance dimension in the giving and taking dictator games, his study conjectures that there is a difference between the social discounting rate (a summary measure of altruism) for the giving frame compared to that for the taking frame due to various moral costs associated with framing. Indeed, the study finds that the cold prickle of taking is stronger than the warm glow of giving. The study extends the literature on giving-taking framing in dictator games and makes a contribution by focusing on non-WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) society, i.e., South African informal settlement, and using the summary measure of altruism in the form of social discounting rate.
