1,066,968 research outputs found
Heterogeneous Social Preferences
Recent research has shown the usefulness of social preferences for explaining behavior in laboratory experiments. This paper demonstrates that models of social preferences are particularly powerful in explaining behavior if they are embedded in a setting of heteroge-neous actors with heterogeneous (social) preferences. For this purpose a simple model is in-troduced that combines the basic ideas of inequity aversion, social welfare preferences, recip-rocity and heterogeneity. This model is applied to 43 games and it can be shown that its pre-dictive accuracy is clearly higher than that of the isolated approaches. Furthermore, it can explain most of the "anomalies" (the "contradictions") that are discussed in Goeree and Holt (2001).
A threshold for majority in the context of aggregating partial order relations
We consider a voting problem where voters have expressed their preferences on a single set of objects. These preferences take the shape of strict partial order relations. In order to allow extraction of a unique strict partial order relation corresponding to a social set of preferences, we determine the minimum number of votes a pairwise preference should receive in order to qualify as a social pairwise preference. Transitive closure of the social pairwise preferences will result in the social set of preferences. At the same time, the social set of preferences needs to be cycle-free, and the minimum number of votes should be determined with this constraint in mind. We provide an example application
Distinguishing Social Preferences from Preferences for Altruism
We report a laboratory experiment that enables us to distinguish preferences for altruism (concerning tradeoffs between own payoffs and the payoffs of others) from social preferences (concerning tradeoffs between the payoffs of others). By using graphical representations of three-person Dictator Games that vary the relative prices of giving, we generate a very rich data set well-suited to studying behavior at the level of the individual subject. We attempt to recover subjects’ underlying preferences by estimating a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) model that represents altruistic and social preferences. We find that both social preferences and preferences for altruism are highly heterogeneous, ranging from utilitarian to Rawlsian. In spite of this heterogeneity across subjects, there exists a strong positive withinsubject correlation between the efficiency-equity tradeoffs made in altruistic and social preferences.
Is the veil of ignorance only a concept about risk? An experiment
We implement the Rawlsian thought experiment of a veil of ignorance in the laboratory which introduces risk and possibly social preferences. We find that both men and women react to the risk introduced by the veil of ignorance. Only the women additionally exhibit social preferences that reflect an increased concern for equality. Our results for women imply that maximin preferences can also be derived from a combination of some, not necessarily infinite risk aversion and social preferences. This result contrasts the Utilitarians' claim that maximin preferences necessarily represent preferences with infinite risk aversion
Social preferences of future physicians.
We measure the social preferences of a sample of US medical students and compare their preferences with those of the general population sampled in the American Life Panel (ALP). We also compare the medical students with a subsample of highly educated, wealthy ALP subjects as well as elite law school students and undergraduate students. We further associate the heterogeneity in social preferences within medical students to the tier ranking of their medical schools and their expected specialty choice. Our experimental design allows us to rigorously distinguish altruism from preferences regarding equality-efficiency tradeoffs and accurately measure both at the individual level rather than pooling data or assuming homogeneity across subjects. This is particularly informative, because the subjects in our sample display widely heterogeneous social preferences in terms of both their altruism and equality-efficiency tradeoffs. We find that medical students are substantially less altruistic and more efficiency focused than the average American. Furthermore, medical students attending the top-ranked medical schools are less altruistic than those attending lower-ranked schools. We further show that the social preferences of those attending top-ranked medical schools are statistically indistinguishable from the preferences of a sample of elite law school students. The key limitation of this study is that our experimental measures of social preferences have not yet been externally validated against actual physician practice behaviors. Pending this future research, we probed the predictive validity of our experimental measures of social preferences by showing that the medical students choosing higher-paying medical specialties are less altruistic than those choosing lower-paying specialties
Social Preferences and Competition
There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view. Social preferences are irrelevant if and only if two conditions are met: separability of preferences and completeness of contracts. These conditions are often plausible, but they fail to hold when uncertainty is important (financial markets) or when incomplete contracts are traded (labor markets). Social preferences can explain many of the anomalies frequently observed on these markets.Social preferences; competition; separability; incomplete contracts; asset markets; labor markets
Social Identity and Preferences
Social identities prescribe behaviors for people. We identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects’ choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient. When we make ethnic identity salient to Asian-American subjects, they make more patient choices. When we make racial identity salient to black subjects, non-immigrant blacks (but not immigrant blacks) make more patient choices. Making gender identity salient has no effect on intertemporal or risk choices.
Social Preferences - Literature Survey
This paper surveys the theories of social preferences. Social preferences are based on that people not only care about their own well-being, but they have a certain concern with payoffs and/or actions of others. We classify two approaches: distributional and intention-based models, and later discuss models that combine both theories. In order to provide a better illustration of the discussed models, we derive predictions of these models for two classic experimental protocols: ultimatum game and public good game with punishment. These predictions are compared with the stylized facts of these two games.
Social Preferences and Competition
There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view. Social preferences are irrelevant if and only if two conditions are met: separability of preferences and completeness of contracts. These conditions are often plausible, but they fail to hold when uncertainty is important (financial markets) or when incomplete contracts are traded (labor markets). Social preferences can explain many of the anomalies frequently observed on these markets.Social preferences; competition; separability; incomplete contracts; asset markets; labor markets
Social Mobility and Demand for Redistribution. A Comparative Analysis
The literature on preferences for redistribution has paid little attention to the effect of social mobility on the demand for redistribution, which is in contrast with the literature on class-voting, where studies on the effect of social mobility has been very common. Some works have addressed this issue but no systematic test of the hypotheses connecting social mobility and preferences has been done. In this paper we use the diagonal reference models to estimate the effect of origin and destination class on preferences for redistribution in a sample of European countries using data from the European Social Survey. Our findings indicate that social origin matters to a little extent to explain preferences, as newcomers tend to adopt the preferences of the destination class. Moreover, we have found only limited evidence supporting the acculturation hypothesis and not support for the status maximization hypothesis. Furthermore, the effect of social origin varies largely between countries. In a second step of the analysis we investigate what are the national factors explaining this variation. The empirical evidence we present leads to conclude that high rates of upward social mobility sharply reduce the effect of social origin on preferences for redistributionUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech
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