To Give or Not To Give? Equity, Efficiency and Altruistic Behavior in a Survey-Based Experiment

Vittorio Pelligra and Luca Stanca

No 202, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper presents the results of a survey-based experiment on the role of equity and efficiency for altruistic behavior. Using simple binary decisions for a representative pool of subjects, we find that both equity and efficiency are relevant for the decision to give. However, contrary to the findings in several laboratory experiments, our results indicate that equity plays a major role for altruistic behavior. Differences in relative payoffs have a significant effect on the decision to give. When giving is not costly, more than half of the subjects prefer equal payoffs to a socially efficient but unequal allocation. When giving is Pareto-improving, half the subjects choose to sacrifice a higher payoff in order to avoid payoff inequality. We also find that preferences, as revealed by experimental choices, are largely consistent with reported pro-social activities, while only weakly related to self-reported well-being.

Keywords: Altruism; Inequality-Aversion; SocialWelfare; Envy; Large-Scale Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C91 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2010-12, Revised 2010-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-hap and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper202.pdf First version, 2010 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: To Give or Not To Give? Equity, Efficiency and Altruistic Behavior in a Survey-Based Experiment (2010)
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:mib:wpaper:202

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matteo Pelagatti ().