Materialistic, pro-social, anti-social, or mixed – A within-subject examination of self- and other-regarding preferences

Abdolkarim Sadrieh and Marina Schröder

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2016, vol. 63, issue C, 114-124

Abstract: We introduce an experimental setup to elicit subjects’ materialistic, pro-social, and anti-social preferences. We find one third of the population exhibits mixed social preferences, choosing to give, to destroy, and to keep some payoffs. Most others are either materialistic, keeping all payoffs, or pro-social, giving some and keeping some, but not destroying payoffs. For individuals with mixed social preferences, giving and destruction are positively correlated, but do not seem to be influenced by payoff comparisons. We find that full information and experimenter demand may increase the extent of pro-social preferences, but do not affect the extent of anti-social preferences or the distribution of social types in the population.

Keywords: Altruism; Joy of destruction; Other-regarding behavior; Giving and destruction; Fairness; Spite (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C90 D31 D63 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:63:y:2016:i:c:p:114-124

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2016.05.009

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