Prosocial Behaviour Between The Rich and The Poor: An Evidence Using A Rosca-Mimicking Game

In the past ten years, the world’s income inequality increased to its peak. One of the determinant factors causing such disparity is the lack of access to financial resources for the poor. In the history of financial inclusion, Rotating Saving and Credit Association (Rosca) is the earliest concept that inspires experts to build a bridge between the rich and the poor through the world of microfinance. Since in the microfinance world, community-based lending and financing plays an important role, and that some people may have the tendency to free-ride, it is essential to understand what might drive such behaviour. Therefore, this study aim is to examine how group formation from a self-assigned method may trigger prosocial behaviour. Besides, the debate over who may show higher prosocial behaviour – the rich or the poor, remains. Inspired by Rosca success stories from across nations, this study uses a group game mimicking-Rosca through an online survey tool. In the Rosca game, the participant was asked to decide whether to pay the contribution for each round or exit the game and take the endowment fund plus the number of tokens they have won from the game. 380 samples obtained was then analysed using the non-parametric tests – using Binomial, Chi-squared, Mann-Whitney, Fisher Exact, and Kruskal-Wallis test, and parametric tests of OLS and ordinal probit analysis as the robustness check. This report concludes that being in a non-anonymous group and being in a group with the rich influences people\'s behaviour – indicating prosocial behaviour. Additionally, male and white ethnicity also tend to behave more selfish compared to other ethnicities. However, the use of Rosca is minimal in prosocial behaviour related studies. Therefore, the findings from this study are expected to be useful as a base for further research, especially for a real-life Rosca field setting.