The distributional preferences of Americans, 2013–2016

Raymond Fisman; Pamela Jakiela; Shachar Kariv; Silvia Vannutelli

doi:10.1007/s10683-023-09792-z

The distributional preferences of Americans, 2013–2016

Raymond Fisman, Pamela Jakiela, Shachar Kariv^*, Silvia Vannutelli

^*Corresponding author for this work

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the distributional preferences of Americans during 2013–2016, a period of social and economic upheaval. We decompose preferences into two qualitatively different tradeoffs—fair-mindedness versus self-interest, and equality versus efficiency—and measure both at the individual level in a large and diverse sample. Although Americans are heterogeneous in terms of both fair-mindedness and equality-efficiency orientation, we find that the individual-level preferences in 2013 are highly predictive of those in 2016. Subjects that experienced an increase in household income became more self-interested, and those who voted for Democratic presidential candidates in both 2012 and 2016 became more equality-oriented.

Original language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	727-748
Number of pages	22
Journal	Experimental Economics
Volume	26
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-023-09792-z
State	Published - Sep 2023

Funding

We are grateful to Ernst Fehr and Daniel Markovits for helpful discussions and for suggestions from the audience at the Ben-Porath Annual Lecture at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a number of seminar participants. We thank the American Life Panel (ALP) team at the RAND Corporation for technical and administrative support. We acknowledge financial support from the Center for Equitable Growth (CEG) at the University of California, Berkeley. Any findings, opinions and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the institutions or any funding agency. The replication material for the study is available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/9EQJZE &faces-redirect=true .

Keywords

American life panel (ALP)
Distributional preferences
Efficiency
Equality
Experiment
Fairness
Household income
Impartiality
Political decisions
Rationality
Redistribution
Revealed preference
Social preferences
Voting

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous)

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10.1007/s10683-023-09792-z

Cite this

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The distributional preferences of Americans, 2013–2016

Abstract

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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