Social Networks 48 (2017) 142–156 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Social Networks jo u r n al hom ep age: www.elsevier.com/locat e/socnet Reciprocation under status ambiguity: How dominance motives and spread of status value shape gift exchange Patrick S. Park a,∗ , Yong-hak Kim b a Department of Sociology, 323 Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, United States b Department of Sociology Widang, Hall #502, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-749, South Korea a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Keywords: Status ambiguity Dominance Gift exchange Reciprocation Competition a b s t r a c t How does status ambiguity affect reciprocation in gift exchange? We argue that actors in an exchange relationship delay reciprocation as a means of subtly claiming dominance when relative status is ambigu- ous. Using a two-step link-tracing sample of gift exchange dyads from an online social network site in the early days of social media, we analyze the probability of two-way exchange dyads and the timing of reciprocation while accounting for the nested and autocorrelated data structure. The results support the predicted inverted-U shape relationship between the hazard of reciprocation and status difference. This pattern is strongest when actors lack common foci of interaction from which relative status could be gauged accurately. In addition, a higher status individual tends to delay reciprocation longer than a lower-status individual, a finding consistent with the status competition explanation. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Someone who pays less attention to you than you pay to her implicitly asserts that she is superior to you in status. Roger Gould, 2003 1. Introduction Status differentiation in interpersonal relationships shapes the distribution of resources in social exchange. The higher status individual in an exchange relationship, for example, gains more than her lower status counterpart, net of the positional advantage derived from the structure of the exchange network in both simul- taneous and turn-taking forms of exchange (Molm, 2003, 2010; Thye, 2000). 1 A mechanism behind this general tendency is the ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: pp286@cornell.edu (P.S. Park), yhakim@yonsei.ac.kr (Y.-h. Kim). 1 Simultaneous exchange (e.g. market exchange) is also referred as negotiated or bilateral exchange and turn-taking exchange (e.g. gift) is referred to as reciprocal or unilateral exchange in the social exchange literature (Molm, 2003). Note that reciprocal exchange as a form highlights the asynchronicity of exchange and does not necessarily imply that transactions are reciprocal in a quid-pro-quo fashion. spread of status value (Berger and Fisek, 2006; Thye, 2000; Walker et al., 2011) where the value of an exchanged object is linked to the status of the giver. Since the value of the object that a higher sta- tus person gives is higher, the lower status person, in return, feels obligated to give more to the higher status person in frequency or quantity to compensate for the differences in status value and accept the resulting unequal distribution of resources. This expla- nation has held up well against experimental evidence where the experimenter could operationalize unambiguous status differences between exchange partners to test monotonic increases in the dis- parity of resource exchange as status gap increase. It is unclear, however, whether exchange behavior and the resulting resource distribution follow this same logic in situations where it is uncer- tain exactly who assumes higher status and who exerts dominance over whom. 2 This paper focuses on how status ambiguities could prompt dominance competitions in the form of gift exchange. Recent studies of crime and deviance (Faris and Felmlee, 2011; Gould, 2003; Papachristos, 2009) argue that ambiguities in status raise the chances that two actors escalate aggression and resort to 2 Here we differentiate between status as a visible and widely accepted status characteristic which is accepted and maintained at the collective level (Berger and Fisek, 2006) and dominance as an interpersonal or dyadic characteristic that one can figure out by observing “who decides what goes on in the relationship (Gould, 2003).” Holding higher position in status does not directly translate into correspond- ing arrangements in dyadic dominance. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2016.08.004 0378-8733/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.