Helping the Meaner, Hurting the Nicer: The Contribution versus Distribution Game

Abstract

A wide experimental evidence shows that people, do care about their opponents' payoff during social interaction. Our design aims at shed light over the relative importance of different motives behind non selfish choices highlighted in the recent literature. After a standard public good game, one player is given the possibility to increase or decrease his opponent's payoff. While our baseline treatment replicates the tendency to hurt richer lower contributors and help poorer higher contributors. By adding exogenous assignments by the experimenter we find substantial willingness to hurt the richer even if he or she had contributed more and to help the poorer even if they had contributed less. These results show a greater focus on correcting inequality rather than on punishing or rewarding behavior. Moreover, we also find that subjects disregard efficiency, in terms of the overall pie to be shared. Overall, our data support inequality aversion as a more robust phenomenon than reciprocity and efficiency considerations.