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).

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 - 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 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 preferences, accountability, and wage bargaining

We assess the extent of preferences for employment in a collective wage bargaining situation with heterogeneous workers. We vary the size of the union and introduce a treatment mechanism transforming the voting game into an individual allocation task. Our results show that highly productive workers do not take employment of low productive workers into account when making wage proposals, regardless of whether insiders determine the wage or all workers. The level of pro-social preferences is small in the voting game, while it increases as the game is transformed into an individual allocation task. We interpret this as an accountability effect

Social Preferences and Public Economics: Mechanism design when social preferences depend on incentives

Social preferences such as altruism, reciprocity, intrinsic motivation and a desire to uphold ethical norms are essential to good government, often facilitating socially desirable allocations that would be unattainable by incentives that appeal solely to self-interest. But experimental and other evidence indicates that conventional economic incentives and social preferences may be either complements or substitutes, explicit incentives crowding in or crowding out social preferences. We investigate the design of optimal incentives to contribute to a public good under these conditions. We identify cases in which a sophisticated planner cognizant of these non-additive effects would make either more or less use of explicit incentives, by comparison to a naive planner who assumes they are absent. JEL Categories: D52, D64, H21. H41Social preferences, implementation theory, incentive contracts, incomplete contracts, framing, motivational crowding out, ethical norms, constitutions

Social Preferences in Small‐Scale Societies

This volume reports on a cross‐cultural investigation of social preferences in 15 small‐scale, non‐Western societies. Participants from all 15 groups played the ultimatum game with members of their own culture; subjects from a subset also played dictator and voluntary contribution to public goods games. The bulk of the book (Chapters 4 through 14) consists of reports by the field workers (mostly anthropologists). Each chapter includes ethnographic information, a description of how members of the group make their living, details on the experimental protocols and results, and some discussion. Although none of the results are consistent with the predictions of the standard rational choice model (as has been true in earlier work), group average offers and rejection frequencies in these experiments display more variation than has been observed in experiments using university students from developed Westernized societies. The editors report that little of this variation can be accounted for by individual economic or demographic variables, such as gender, age, education, or wealth. On the other hand, group dummies account for quite a lot, and social preferences seem to be stronger in groups experiencing greater market integration or whose economic mode offers greater opportunities for gains from cooperative enterprise

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