The trade-off between welfare and equality in a public good experiment

Agathe Rouaix, Charles Figuieres and Marc Willinger

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 45, issue 3, 623 pages

Abstract: We report the results of an experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good in which we implement a redistribution of the group endowment among group members in a lump sum manner. We study the impact of redistribution on group contribution, on individuals’ contributions according to their endowment and on welfare. Our experimental results show that welfare increases when equality is broken, as predicted by theory (Itaya et al. in, Econ Lett 57:289–296, 1997 ), because the larger contribution of the rich subjects overcompensates the lower contribution of the poor subjects. However, our data suggest that the adjustment of individual contributions after redistribution is not always compatible with the predictions. In particular, subjects who become poor contribute much less than subjects who were poor since the beginning. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-015-0893-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The trade-off between welfare and equality in a public good experiment (2013)
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:spr:sochwe:v:45:y:2015:i:3:p:601-623

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-015-0893-4

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().