Purely Procedural Preferences in Auctions, with a comment to: Equality of opportunity and the acceptability of outcome inequality

Sugden and Wang (2020) are among the first to model intrinsic concerns for equal op- portunities. Their study reports that after being subjected to unequal opportunities, people experience anger, resentment, and greed and all parties involved engage in socially wasteful destruction of resources. In this critique, I point out errors which compromise these findings. The authors study two players in a card game where one player is dealt more replacement cards (unequal opportunities); the highest card wins. These replacement cards must not change the expected outcome of the game if they are to have intrinsic value only. If this is true, however, replacement cards cannot induce distinct expected outcomes, which they must do if they are to constitute opportunities by the authors’ own definition. In short, if replacements do yield distinct expected outcomes, they must inevitably also have instrumental (material) value which confounds the treatment effect. The authors then elicit people’s emotional response to these unequal replacement options in a vendetta game, where players can take and partly destroy each others’ payoff. What remains unnoticed is that the vendetta game itself introduces unequal opportunities along every potential path of play. I append an earlier study which uses a different approach to identify the behavioral consequences of people’s intrinsic concerns for unequal opportunities: In a game which grants one party infinite opportunity and only little to her opponent, players’ departures from narrow rational self-interest are explained by two redundant instruments for equal effective opportunities (Chlaß et al., 2019, Chlaß and Riener, 2015/2025). The party with greater opportunity compensates her opponent; the op- ponent requires to be compensated or else sets all parties’ payoff to zero.