This data set contains experimental data collected as part of the field experiments conducted in West Bengal. These experiments study the effect of religious identity and religious fragmentation on cooperation, rent-seeking and income distribution among Hindu and Muslim groups. We study the effect of religious identity among Hindu and Muslim groups by varying the way our subjects are matched with each other. We implement in-group/in-group treatments where Muslim subjects play with fellow Muslim subjects and Hindu subjects play with fellow Hindu subjects; we also implement in-group/out-group treatments where Hindu subjects play with Muslim subjects. Finally, we have a control treatment where the identity of a subject's match is uncertain. To study the effect of fragmentation, we resort to a quasi-experimental approach. We take religious composition of villages as fixed, based on the village-level survey on religious fragmentation by Das et al. (2011). We select villages in two districts in West Bengal which conform to one of three categories: Muslim-dominated, where over 90% of the population is Muslim; Hindu-dominated, where over 90% of the population is Hindu; and fragmented, where the Muslim and Hindu communities are roughly equal. Our experimental design combines identity treatments with village types to understand how social identity interacts with fragmentation. For more details on the analysis of the data, please see the link to the first working paper to have come out of this project, which can be found in the "Related Resources" section. Tackling increasing resource scarcity is one of the major challenges to policy-makers in developing countries. An important aspect of resource scarcity involves public goods. Lack of public goods, like health and education, can significantly reduce the welfare of individuals and households and often this affects the poorest the most. In India, these issues are amplified by the existence of a long-standing social structure based around caste and religion. Such social fragmentation can result in social exclusion and/or lower public good provision. This project investigates the behavioural foundations of inter-group discrimination on economic performance in rural West Bengal, India. It builds on existing household survey work on religious- and caste-based social exclusion in villages in West Bengal by conducting a series of field experiments. Field experiments study the decisions of agents who in their daily lives are affected by poverty, and help determine the extent to which their preferences regarding caste, ethnicity and religion determine their willingness to socially exclude others or themselves to be excluded. This project‘s findings will help policy-makers to the extent that they facilitate the identification of the right policy response to social exclusion and lower economic performance, which in turn are key determinants of poverty.

The data collection method employed experimental economics. The description of the recruitment of participants and experimental procedures is taken from section 3.4 of Chakravarty, S., Fonseca, M.A., Ghosh, S. and Marjit, S. (2015) "Religious fragmentation, social identity and cooperation: Evidence from a artefactual field experiment in India", University of Exeter Economics Department Discussion Paper Series 15/01. which is the first paper based on this project. A link to this paper is provided in this submission. Please see this paper for more details on the experimental procedures. We employed a mixed-gender, mixed-religion team of local research assistants to recruit participants and conduct the sessions, so as to minimize any possible experimenter demand effect. A week ahead of a planned session, our research assistants travelled to the village where that session would take place. A set of neighborhoods were randomly selected, and within each neighborhood, recruitment was done on a door-by-door basis. On a given street, every two consecutive houses were skipped and the third house would be approached and those who agreed to participate would be signed up. Participants were reminded about the session the day before it took place. Participants did not know the purpose of the experiment: when approached, they were informed that the research team would be conducting decision- making sessions. We conducted one session per village. In the H-H and M-M sessions, all subjects in the room shared the same religion. In the H-M sessions, subjects of both religious were present; Hindu subjects played a Muslim counterpart in every game and vice versa. This was common knowledge. Finally, in the MIX sessions, Hindu and Muslim subjects were present in the session, but they did not know the religion of the person with whom they were playing. Sessions were split in three parts. In the first part, participants played three games: the Prisoners' Dilemma, the Stag-Hunt game and the Tullock contest (in that specific order). In the second part of the session, participants played a series of individual decision-making tasks. In the third part, participants individually responded to a survey in a separate room, got feedback on the decisions made in the experiment, and received their corresponding payment. An experimenter standing in the middle of the room read the instructions aloud, using visual aids to explain the incentive structure of each game (see Appendix for the experimental materials). We did not employ written instructions since about a third of our subjects was unable to read or write. As such, we denoted payoffs in INR and used images of Indian notes and coins to represent payoffs. See materials for details. Prior to the start of each session, an experimenter informed subjects that all decisions taken would be anonymous, there would be no identifying information collected as part of the experiment. Subjects were also told that they had the right to abandon the session; they also had the right to opt out of the study without detriment to their payment for participation. Again, this information was announced orally, as a large proportion of participants were not able to read or write.