Willingness to compete and distributional preferences at early ages: an experimental study of Chinese schoolchildren

Ming Dai, Chi Cui, Tianming Ren and Liu Liu

Economics Letters, 2025, vol. 256, issue C

Abstract: We conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment to examine the relationship between distributional preferences and willingness to compete with 197 Chinese children aged from 9 to 12 years old. Using a real-effort task to elicit competitive choice and a modified dictator game to estimate selfishness-fairness and efficiency-equality tradeoffs via a CES utility framework, we find that children with a strong fairness focus are significantly more likely to choose competitive schemes. Efficiency orientation is positively associated with the competitive choice, and this relationship is moderated by gender. Our findings provide novel evidence on the early emergence of economically relevant preferences.

Keywords: Distributional preferences; Willingness to compete; Selfishness-fairness tradeoff; Efficiency-equality tradeoff; CES utility framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176525004574
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ecolet:v:256:y:2025:i:c:s0165176525004574

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112620

Access Statistics for this article

Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office

More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().