IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/inn/wpaper/2017-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Müller

Abstract

The increasing diversity of societies raises questions about the consequences for redistributive preferences. This paper assesses the impact of social identity on distributional preferences in a modified dictator game. I estimate individual-level utility functions with two parameters that govern the trade-offs between equity and efficiency and giving to self and to other. Subjects on average put less weight on income of the out-group. The out-group treatment also changes the distribution of equity-efficiency concerns. However, the experiment also uncovers a large individual heterogeneity of preferences. An analysis of GARP violations reveals that choices in both treatments overwhelmingly stem from well-behaved, yet systematically different underlying utility functions. Hence, the evidence presented here suggests that the rational choice approach is a useful tool for understanding the effect of social identity on preferences.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Müller, 2017. "The anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity," Working Papers 2017-02, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck, revised Mar 2017.
    • Handle: RePEc:inn:wpaper:2017-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2017-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Syngjoo Choi & Shachar Kariv & Wieland M?ller & Dan Silverman, 2014. "Who Is (More) Rational?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(6), pages 1518-1550, June.
    2. Maria Porter & Abi Adams, 2016. "For Love or Reward? Characterising Preferences for Giving to Parents in an Experimental Setting," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 126(598), pages 2424-2445, December.
    3. Federico Echenique & Sangmok Lee & Matthew Shum, 2011. "The Money Pump as a Measure of Revealed Preference Violations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(6), pages 1201-1223.
    4. Ian Crawford & Bram De Rock, 2014. "Empirical Revealed Preference," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 503-524, August.
    5. Raymond Fisman & Shachar Kariv & Daniel Markovits, 2007. "Individual Preferences for Giving," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1858-1876, December.
    6. Erzo F. P. Luttmer, 2001. "Group Loyalty and the Taste for Redistribution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(3), pages 500-528, June.
    7. Mark Dean & Daniel Martin, 2016. "Measuring Rationality with the Minimum Cost of Revealed Preference Violations," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 98(3), pages 524-534, July.
    8. Hett, Florian & Kröll, Markus & Mechtel, Mario, 2017. "Choosing Who You Are: The Structure and Behavioral Effects of Revealed Identification Preferences," VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking 168223, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. William T. Harbaugh & Kate Krause & Timothy R. Berry, 2001. "GARP for Kids: On the Development of Rational Choice Behavior," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(5), pages 1539-1545, December.
    10. Joan Costa-Font & Frank Cowell, 2015. "Social Identity And Redistributive Preferences: A Survey," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(2), pages 357-374, April.
    11. Syngjoo Choi & Raymond Fisman & Douglas Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2007. "Consistency, Heterogeneity, and Granularity of Individual Behavior under Uncertainty," Economics Working Papers 0076, Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science.
    12. Urs Fischbacher, 2007. "z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 10(2), pages 171-178, June.
    13. Gary Charness & Luca Rigotti & Aldo Rustichini, 2007. "Individual Behavior and Group Membership," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(4), pages 1340-1352, September.
    14. Gary Charness & Matthew Rabin, 2002. "Understanding Social Preferences with Simple Tests," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(3), pages 817-869.
    15. Lorenz Goette & David Huffman & Stephan Meier, 2006. "The Impact of Group Membership on Cooperation and Norm Enforcement: Evidence Using Random Assignment to Real Social Groups," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(2), pages 212-216, May.
    16. Bart Smeulders & Laurens Cherchye & Bram De Rock & Frits C. R. Spieksma, 2013. "The Money Pump as a Measure of Revealed Preference Violations: A Comment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 121(6), pages 1248-1258.
    17. Ryan D. Enos, 2016. "What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 60(1), pages 123-142, January.
    18. Syngjoo Choi & Raymond Fisman & Douglas Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2007. "Consistency and Heterogeneity of Individual Behavior under Uncertainty," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(5), pages 1921-1938, December.
    19. Dimitri Landa & Dominik Duell, 2015. "Social Identity and Electoral Accountability," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 59(3), pages 671-689, July.
    20. Klor, Esteban F. & Shayo, Moses, 2010. "Social identity and preferences over redistribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(3-4), pages 269-278, April.
    21. Chambers,Christopher P. & Echenique,Federico, 2016. "Revealed Preference Theory," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9781107087804.
    22. Christina M. Fong & Erzo F. P. Luttmer, 2009. "What Determines Giving to Hurricane Katrina Victims? Experimental Evidence on Racial Group Loyalty," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(2), pages 64-87, April.
    23. Alexander W. Cappelen & Astri Drange Hole & Erik Ø Sørensen & Bertil Tungodden, 2007. "The Pluralism of Fairness Ideals: An Experimental Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(3), pages 818-827, June.
    24. Orr, Larry L, 1976. "Income Transfers as a Public Good: An Application to AFDC," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 66(3), pages 359-371, June.
    25. Helen Bernhard & Ernst Fehr & Urs Fischbacher, 2006. "Group Affiliation and Altruistic Norm Enforcement," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(2), pages 217-221, May.
    26. Glenn Harrison & E. Rutström, 2009. "Expected utility theory and prospect theory: one wedding and a decent funeral," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 12(2), pages 133-158, June.
    27. Chambers, Christopher P. & Echenique, Federico & Shmaya, Eran, 2017. "General revealed preference theory," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(2), May.
    28. Sippel, Reinhard, 1997. "An Experiment on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behaviour," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(444), pages 1431-1444, September.
    29. Yan Chen & Sherry Xin Li, 2009. "Group Identity and Social Preferences," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(1), pages 431-457, March.
    30. Holger Stichnoth & Karine Van der Straeten, 2013. "Ethnic Diversity, Public Spending, And Individual Support For The Welfare State: A Review Of The Empirical Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(2), pages 364-389, April.
    31. James Andreoni & John Miller, 2002. "Giving According to GARP: An Experimental Test of the Consistency of Preferences for Altruism," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(2), pages 737-753, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fosgaard, Toke R. & Hansen, Lars G. & Wengström, Erik, 2019. "Cooperation, framing, and political attitudes," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 158(C), pages 416-427.
    2. Florian Hett & Markus Kröll & Mario Mechtel, 2019. "Choosing Who You Are: The Structure and Behavioral Effects of Revealed Identification Preferences," Working Papers 1903, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
    3. Kerschbamer, Rudolf & Müller, Daniel, 2020. "Social preferences and political attitudes: An online experiment on a large heterogeneous sample," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 182(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Müller, Daniel, 2019. "The anatomy of distributional preferences with group identity," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 166(C), pages 785-807.
    2. Pawel Dziewulski, 2021. "A comprehensive revealed preference approach to approximate utility maximisation," Working Paper Series 0621, Department of Economics, University of Sussex Business School.
    3. Dziewulski, Paweł, 2020. "Just-noticeable difference as a behavioural foundation of the critical cost-efficiency index," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 188(C).
    4. Yoram Halevy & Dotan Persitz & Lanny Zrill, 2018. "Parametric Recoverability of Preferences," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(4), pages 1558-1593.
    5. Brocas, Isabelle & Carrillo, Juan D. & Combs, T. Dalton & Kodaverdian, Niree, 2019. "Consistency in simple vs. complex choices by younger and older adults," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 580-601.
    6. Pawel Dziewulski, 2018. "Just-noticeable difference as a behavioural foundation of the critical cost-efficiency," Economics Series Working Papers 848, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    7. Smeulders, Bart & Crama, Yves & Spieksma, Frits C.R., 2019. "Revealed preference theory: An algorithmic outlook," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 272(3), pages 803-815.
    8. Bauer, Kevin, 2020. "How did we do? The impact of relative performance feedback on intergroup hostilities," SAFE Working Paper Series 281, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    9. Laurens Cherchye & Thomas Demuynck & Bram De Rock & Joshua Lanier, 2020. "Are Consumers Rational ?Shifting the Burden of Proof," Working Papers ECARES 2020-19, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    10. Eileen Tipoe & Abi Adams & Ian Crawford, 2022. "Revealed preference analysis and bounded rationality [Consume now or later? Time inconsistency, collective choice and revealed preference]," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(2), pages 313-332.
    11. Suchon, Rémi & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2019. "The effects of status mobility and group identity on trust," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 430-463.
    12. Marie Claire Villeval, 2021. "Group Identity and Social Preferences by Yan Chen and Sherry X. Li," Post-Print halshs-03504258, HAL.
    13. Mir Adnan Mahmood & John Rehbeck, 2022. "Correcting for Random Budgets in Revealed Preference Experiments," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(2), pages 1-14, April.
    14. Klor, Esteban F. & Shayo, Moses, 2010. "Social identity and preferences over redistribution," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(3-4), pages 269-278, April.
    15. Carrillo, Juan & Brocas, Isabelle & Combs, T. Dalton, 2015. "Consistency in Simple vs. Complex Choices over the Life Cycle," CEPR Discussion Papers 10457, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Castillo, Marco E. & Cross, Philip J. & Freer, Mikhail, 2019. "Nonparametric utility theory in strategic settings: Revealing preferences and beliefs from proposal–response games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 115(C), pages 60-82.
    17. Changkuk Im & John Rehbeck, 2021. "Non-rationalizable Individuals, Stochastic Rationalizability, and Sampling," Papers 2102.03436, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    18. Aluma Dembo & Shachar Kariv & Matthew Polisson & John Quah, 2021. "Ever since Allais," IFS Working Papers W21/15, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    19. Marie Claire Villeval, 2021. "Group Identity and Social Preferences (chapter X)," Post-Print halshs-03504316, HAL.
    20. Jim Engle-Warnick & Natalia Mishagina, 2014. "Insensitivity to Prices in a Dictator Game," CIRANO Working Papers 2014s-19, CIRANO.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social identity; inequality; distributional preferences; GARP; rationality; in-groupÐoutgroup bias;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D30 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - General
    • H30 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - General
    • H80 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inn:wpaper:2017-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Janette Walde (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fuibkat.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.