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Prosocial Risk-Taking: Growing the Pie or Increasing your Slice?

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  • Nina Weber

Abstract

Many personally risky decisions, such as innovation and entrepreneurship, have the potential to increase overall welfare by creating positive externalities for society. Rewarding such prosocial risk-taking may be an important strategy in addressing societal challenges like, for example, the climate emergency, by promoting innovation that has positive externalities for the environment. A fundamental constraint for policy makers in rewarding such behaviour are however individuals’ distributive preferences. In this paper, I provide a theoretical framework and a first experimental test of how distributive preferences are affected by potential positive externalities of risky behaviour.

Suggested Citation

  • Nina Weber, 2023. "Prosocial Risk-Taking: Growing the Pie or Increasing your Slice?," ifo Working Paper Series 399, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifowps:_399
    as

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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Prosocial risk-taking; distributive preferences; fairness;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

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