Purely procedural preferences - Beyond procedural equity and reciprocity

Nadine Chlaß, Werner Güth and Topi Miettinen

European Journal of Political Economy, 2019, vol. 59, issue C, 108-128

Abstract: We conduct experiments in which parties face a pair of two-player pie-splitting procedures. Parties submit their strategy in each, their beliefs about their opponent's choices, and are also asked whether they prefer one procedure over the other. The procedures – a yes-no game, an ultimatum game, and a dictator game – are designed such that by all existing economic preference models, whether distributive or procedural, parties should be indifferent between them. In particular, the procedures should yield the same outcomes, the same expected outcomes and carry the same information on parties' intentions. At the same time, the procedures differ in the way they distribute decision and information rights across players, and also in their complexity and efficiency. Experimentally, parties do indeed still reveal preferences over the procedures at hand. To explore why this happens, we elicit individuals' simplicity and efficiency ratings of the procedures, and also the degree by which individuals invoke the equality of basic rights and liberties in their moral judgement – an ethical criterion not yet captured by any preference model. The preferences we find link to this data. We explore formalizations for such preferences.

Keywords: Procedural preferences; Equality of rights; Experiment; Institutional design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C90 D02 D03 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Purely Procedural Preferences - Beyond Procedural Equity and Reciprocity (2014)
Working Paper: Purely Procedural Preferences - Beyond Procedural Equity and Reciprocity (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:59:y:2019:i:c:p:108-128

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2019.02.005

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