Median voting and intergenerational sustainability under intragenerational inequality

Intergenerational sustainability (IS) and inequality problems have been significant over time, encompassing climate change, income disparity and fiscal sustainability. While there have been several studies that deal with IS problems, such as people's selfishness under inequality, little is known about the mechanisms and/or institutions that contribute to their solution. This paper investigates how a median-voting institution impacts people's behaviors towards IS under intragenerational inequality, hypothesizing that median voting by Hauser et al. (2014) induces people to behave sustainably toward future generations. An online Intergenerational Common Goods Game (IGG) experiment is conducted with 210 subjects under two treatments with and without the median voting under the inequality that is approximated by heterogeneous initial endowments to subjects in a generation. In IGG, five subjects in one generation are asked to decide how much to harvest for themselves from an intergenerational common good. If the generation’s extraction does not exceed (exceeds) a certain threshold, the good is replenished (depleted) and is (not) transferred to the next generation. Under median voting, the extraction by each member in a generation is determined by the median value of members’ intended harvests. We find that median voting mitigates people's intended harvests, contributing to IS even under intragenerational inequality. This suggests that introducing median-voting mechanism may prove sustainable in intergenerational decisions, even though the actual application in an unequal modern-day capitalist society remains on the agenda.