How information about effort and luck shapes altruism of social preferences: a survey experiment

Begoña Cabeza Martínez () and Koen Decancq ()
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Begoña Cabeza Martínez: European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Koen Decancq: Centre for Social Policy (University of Antwerp)

The Journal of Economic Inequality, 2025, vol. 23, issue 3, No 5, 695-716

Abstract: Abstract This paper introduces a test to compare the levels of altruism of social preferences over the decision maker’s own and another person’s monetary pay-off. We propose a straightforward adaptive bisectional method for eliciting social preferences, applied in an online survey experiment with 573 decision makers. In the experiment, we provided randomized information about the other person’s effort and luck to assess how this information influences the altruism of the social preferences. Our results reveal that decision makers exhibit greater altruism when informed of high effort and reduced altruism when the other person is perceived as lucky.

Keywords: Altruism; Information; Social preferences; Survey experiment; Vignette (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s10888-025-09699-0

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