Distributional Preferences Explain Individual Behavior Across Games and Time

Morten Hedegaard, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Daniel Müller and Jean-Robert Tyran
Additional contact information
Morten Hedegaard: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Daniel Müller: University of Innsbruck, Austria
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Daniel Müller

No 19-06, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: We use a large and heterogeneous sample of the Danish population to investigate the importance of distributional preferences for behavior in a public good game and a trust game. We find robust evidence for the significant explanatory power of distributional preferences. In fact, compared to twenty-one covariates, distributional preferences turn out to be the single most important predictor of behavior. Specifically, subjects who reveal benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality contribute more to the public good and are more likely to pick the trustworthy action in the trust game than other subjects. Since the experiments were spread out more than one year, our results suggest that there is a component of distributional preferences that is stable across games and over time.

Keywords: Distributional preferences; social preferences; Equality-Equivalence Test; representative online experiment; trust game; public goods game; dictator game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2019-05-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://www.economics.ku.dk/research/publications/wp/dp_2019/1906.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Distributional preferences explain individual behavior across games and time (2021)
Working Paper: Distributional Preferences Explain Individual Behavior Across Games and Time (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kuiedp:1906

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