Distributional preferences explain individual behavior across games and time
- Author(s)
- Morten Hedegaard, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Daniel Müller, Jean-Robert Tyran
- Abstract
We use a large and heterogeneous sample of the Danish population to investigate the importance of distributional preferences for behavior in a trust game and a public good 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 are more likely to pick the trustworthy action in the trust game and contribute more to the public good 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.
- Organisation(s)
- Vienna Center for Experimental Economics, Department of Economics
- External organisation(s)
- Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, University of Copenhagen
- Journal
- Games and Economic Behavior
- Volume
- 128
- Pages
- 231-255
- No. of pages
- 25
- ISSN
- 0899-8256
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2021.05.003
- Publication date
- 07-2021
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502045 Behavioural economics, 502057 Experimental economics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Economics and Econometrics, Finance
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/distributional-preferences-explain-individual-behavior-across-games-and-time(3df84eea-17b4-4237-9ed2-2ff25e76e87b).html