Elements of a Script for Friendship in Transactions

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Social norms constrain people's behaviors in transactions, but such norms are rarely investigated. Script theory provides a coherent, holistic structure for understanding socially mediated behaviors. This study proposes terms of a script for the pricing behavior of transactors when friendship is considered. The script generates testable hypotheses, which are studied in three lab-based experiments. Vignette studies considered the effect of friendship on two-party transactions and revealed consistent behaviors. Without discussion, subjects exhibit consistent agreement for what constitutes appropriate pricing for friends and for strangers in different contexts: when pricing a variety of commodities for a transaction, when acting as agents for a friend or a stranger, and when observing others engaged in such transactions.