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It is now well documented that individuals are sensitive to the way others perceive them
and yet there is no systematic way of measuring this dimension of preferences. In this paper,
we propose a novel experimental game to measure the sensitivity to image concerns and we
test it experimentally. We find a large heterogeneity in the population: one third of the sample
appears totally insensitive to perceptions by others. Older people, foreigners and those with
less friends seem to be more imaged concerned. We find that more image concerned individuals
are not typically more altruistic, but appear to be more sensitive to deviations by others
from the social norm. Finally, we find preliminary evidence suggesting that individuals do
not only care about the absolute image they convey, but also about how far this image is from
reality.
