Journal Article
An Experimental Study on Individual Choice, Social Welfare, and Social Preferences
We experimentally study subjects’ compliance with dominance relationships of income distributions in a ranking task. The experiment consisted of four different treatments: lottery, individual choice, social preferences, and social planner. Our results suggest that people’s risk attitudes do not adequately reflect their inequality attitudes. Uninvolved social planners exhibit randomization preferences, while self-interested social planners are generally more inequality averse and try to avoid extreme outcomes.
Key Words
- inequality
- preferences
- procedural fairness
- risk
- Ungleichheit