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‘Give me a chance!’ An experiment in social decision under risk

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Michal Krawczyk  and
Fabrice Le Lec
Michal Krawczyk*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw, 44/50 Dluga, 00-241 Warsaw, Poland
Fabrice Le Lec*
Affiliation:
Lille Economics and Management UMR CNRS 8179, Catholic University of Lille, 41 rue du Port, 59000 Lille, France
*
e-mail: [email protected]
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper reports the results of a ‘probabilistic dictator game’ experiment in which subjects were given an option to share chances to win a prize with a dummy player. Using a within-subject design we manipulated two aspects of the decision, the relative cost of sharing and the nature of the lottery: the draws were either independent for the two players (‘noncompetitive’ condition) or one's success meant other's failure (‘competitive’ condition). We also asked for decisions in a standard, non-probabilistic, setting. The main results can be summarized as follows: first, a substantial fraction of subjects do share chances to win, also in the competitive treatments, thus showing concern for the other player that cannot be explained by outcome-based models. Second, subjects share less in the competitive treatment than in other treatments, indicating that procedural fairness alone cannot explain the data. Overall, these results suggest that models aiming at generalizing social concerns to risky environments will have to rely on a mix of distributive and procedural fairness.

Keywords

Social preferencesOther-regarding preferencesInequity aversionSocial concernSocial preferences under riskProcedural fairness

JEL classification

D63: Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement A13: Relation of Economics to Social Values C65: Miscellaneous Mathematical Tools C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 13 , Issue 4 , December 2010 , pp. 500 - 511
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2010

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