Distributional preferences explain individual behavior across games and time

Autor(en)
Morten Hedegaard, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Daniel Müller, Jean-Robert Tyran
Abstrakt

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(en)
Wiener Zentrum für Experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung, Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre
Externe Organisation(en)
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, University of Copenhagen
Journal
Games and Economic Behavior
Band
128
Seiten
231-255
Anzahl der Seiten
25
ISSN
0899-8256
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2021.05.003
Publikationsdatum
07-2021
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
502045 Verhaltensökonomie, 502057 Experimentelle Ökonomie
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
Economics and Econometrics, Finance
Link zum Portal
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/distributional-preferences-explain-individual-behavior-across-games-and-time(3df84eea-17b4-4237-9ed2-2ff25e76e87b).html