Inequality, envy and personality in public goods: An experimental study

Bereket Kebede, Nicole Gross-Camp, Adrian Martin, Shawn McGuire and Joseph Munyarukaza

No 2018-10, CSAE Working Paper Series from Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of inequality on contributions to public goods focusing on the mediating role of personality using an inequality aversion model as a theoretical framework and experimental data from rural Rwanda. As predicted by the theoretical model, low-income players contribute less. We examine the predictive power of two personality approaches. The first is a person-centred approach using latent class analysis (LCA) to identify types of individuals with specific constellation of Big Five dimensions. The second focuses on individual dimensions of Big Five. While the person-centred approach has no explanatory power, one dimension of Big Five, Extraversion, is a significant and robust determinant; low-income players with higher Extraversion significantly reduce their contribution. Further exploratory analyses focusing on two dimensions of Big Five reveal that it does not provide any additional explanation compared to when each dimension is considered.

Keywords: public goods games; personality; inequality; envy; Rwanda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D63 H41 O12 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-gth
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:csa:wpaper:2018-10

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