Distinguishing Social Preferences from Preferences for Altruism

Raymond Fisman, Shachar Kariv () and Daniel Markovits ()
Additional contact information
Shachar Kariv: Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Markovits: Yale Law School

No 61, Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science

Abstract: We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to distinguish preferences for altruism (concerning tradeoffs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others) from social preferences (concerning tradeoffs between the payoffs of others). By using graphical representations of three-person Dictator Games that vary the relative prices of giving, we generate a very rich data set well-suited to studying behavior at the level of the individual subject. We attempt to recover subjects’ underlying preferences by estimating a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) model that represents altruistic and social preferences. We find that both social preferences and preferences for altruism are highly heterogeneous, ranging from utilitarian to Rawlsian. In spite of this heterogeneity across subjects, there exists a strong positive withinsubject correlation between the efficiency-equity tradeoffs made in altruistic and social preferences.

JEL-codes: C79 C91 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2005-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/econpaper61.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/econpaper61.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/econpaper61.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.ias.edu/sss/publications/papers/econpaper61.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Distinguishing Social Preferences from Preferences for Altruism (2005)
Working Paper: Distinguishing Social Preferences from Preferences for Altruism (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ads:wpaper:0061

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nancy Cotterman ().