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Equity vs. efficiency vs. self-interest: on the use of dictator games to measure distributional preferences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Pamela Jakiela
Pamela Jakiela*
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We conduct modified dictator games in which price of giving varies across choice situations, and examine responses to price changes in two contexts—one where dictators divide their own earnings, and another where they divide the earnings of others. Varying the price of giving allows us to decompose social preferences into two components: the level of altruism when the price of giving is one, and the willingness to reduce aggregate payoffs to enhance equity. Changing the source of a dictator’s budget impacts her decisions because it affects the weight that she places on others’ payoffs. However, we find no impacts on the willingness to trade off equity and efficiency.

Keywords

Social preferencesEquity-efficiency tradeoffsExperiments
Type
Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 208 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-012-9332-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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