Measures Of Social Preferences Research Articles

On the opposition to market institutions on moral grounds

From a liberal viewpoint, voluntary trade appears to be something that should meet universal approval. If no one is obliged to trade, establishing a market institution could only make all better off. Nonetheless, specific market institutions meet substantial skepticism and criticism. This paper extends the extant literature by surveying the moral opposition towards trade in multiple dimensions and linking this to policy support measures. We provide survey results on moral opposition to trade in organs, sex services, surrogate mothers, trade in carbon permits, goods produced in poor countries, and food from countries where people suffer from hunger. These cover the potential reasons for opposing trade institutions: moral concerns, paternalism regarding risk-taking, and distributional concerns. Beyond this, we measure support for policies on unemployment benefits, risk prevention, equality goals within society, and redistribution. The survey of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers from the U.S. reveals significant moral opposition to trade in diverse dimensions. About a third of the participants strongly oppose trade in body items, sex services, and food imports from countries where a large proportion of the population suffers from hunger and malnutrition. Fewer participants strongly oppose trading CO2 permits, importing from developing countries, or allowing surrogate mothership. Besides other correlates (e.g., gender, education, being conservative), individuals’ attitudes towards imposing risks on others are identified as an important correlate of the opposition to trade for all the contexts of trade: those who are averse to exposing others to risk for their own advantage are more likely to oppose trading institutions. This measure of social preferences also relates to support for policies on risk prevention, equality goals within society, and redistribution. We discuss potential mechanisms behind this explanatory power of the newly identified measure.

The Strategy Method Risks Conflating Confusion with a Social Preference for Conditional Cooperation in Public Goods Games

The strategy method is often used in public goods games to measure an individual’s willingness to cooperate depending on the level of cooperation by their groupmates (conditional cooperation). However, while the strategy method is informative, it risks conflating confusion with a desire for fair outcomes, and its presentation may risk inducing elevated levels of conditional cooperation. This problem was highlighted by two previous studies which found that the strategy method could also detect equivalent levels of cooperation even among those grouped with computerized groupmates, indicative of confusion or irrational responses. However, these studies did not use large samples (n = 40 or 72) and only made participants complete the strategy method one time, with computerized groupmates, preventing within-participant comparisons. Here, in contrast, 845 participants completed the strategy method two times, once with human and once with computerized groupmates. Our research aims were twofold: (1) to check the robustness of previous results with a large sample under various presentation conditions; and (2) to use a within-participant design to categorize participants according to how they behaved across the two scenarios. Ideally, a clean and reliable measure of conditional cooperation would find participants conditionally cooperating with humans and not cooperating with computers. Worryingly, only 7% of participants met this criterion. Overall, 83% of participants cooperated with the computers, and the mean contributions towards computers were 89% as large as those towards humans. These results, robust to the various presentation and order effects, pose serious concerns for the measurement of social preferences and question the idea that human cooperation is motivated by a concern for equal outcomes.

Why do Big Science projects exist? The role of social preferences

Abstract Recent work has excluded sociocultural factors among the determinants of Big Science projects. This paper empirically tests the role of four different measures of social preferences, namely altruism, trust, negative reciprocity, and positive reciprocity, in increasing the likelihood of sustaining international cooperation in Big Science projects. Using a novel database of cross-sectional observations from seventy-six countries, this study finds evidence of a positive and statistically significant relationship between negative reciprocity and both time and risk preferences, namely patience and risk-taking. The science policy implication of this study is that a broader theory of clubs can guide meta-organizations in establishing, maintaining, or denying membership in Big Science projects based on the long-term orientation and reputation as a committed cooperator of a country.

Health Externalities and Policy: The Role of Social Preferences

Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example, by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences. Controlling for time-varying heterogeneity that could arise at the level at which mitigation policies are implemented, we find that they matter less in regions that are more altruistic, patient, or exhibit less negative reciprocity. In those regions, mobility falls ahead of lockdowns, and remains low after the lifting thereof. Our results elucidate the importance, independent of the cultural context, of social preferences in fostering cooperative behavior. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

The Development of Prosociality: Evidence for a Negative Association between Age and Prosocial Value Orientation from a Representative Sample in Austria

While the ontogeny of prosociality during infancy, childhood, and adolescence has received substantial attention over the last decades, little is known about how prosocial preferences develop beyond emerging adulthood. Recent evidence suggests that the previously observed positive association between age and prosocial preferences is less robust than assumed. This study reports results on the association between social preferences, age, gender, and education from an Austrian representative sample (N = 777, aged 16–94 years) in which incentivized social value orientations (SVO) were measured along with various other sociodemographic characteristics. The analyses confirm that men are less prosocial than women, however, mainly during emerging adulthood (16–25 years). At the same time, the decline of prosociality is stronger among women leading to a convergence of prosociality between men and women as they age. Overall, we find that a prosocial value orientation is negatively correlated with people’s age. We suspect that the susceptibility of peoples’ social preferences to the preferences of others in their social environment is a critical factor unifying these different observations in the development of prosociality. We hypothesize that the opposite associations between age and SVO observed in two previous studies using unincentivized measures of social preferences are explained in parts by an age-related change in social desirability, measurement inaccuracy (continuous vs. categorical), and cross-cultural differences promoting competitive preferences among emerging adults in Japan. Moreover, we find that political orientations towards right-wing populists are consistently associated with less prosocial preferences, while education seems to be positively associated with prosociality. Overall, our study highlights the importance of conducting representative studies using incentivized measurements across cultures.

Dictator game variants with probabilistic (and cost-saving) payoffs: A systematic test

• I test the validity of dictator game variants with probabilistic payoffs. • I include probabilistic decision or player payment, and role uncertainty. • I relate transfers to complementary individual difference measures of prosociality. • Data show that dictator behavior is sensitive to the applied methods. • Results confirm that role uncertainty in particular distorts validity. Driven by methodological concerns, theoretical considerations, and previous evidence, I systematically test the validity of common dictator game variants with probabilistic payoffs. Using a unified experimental framework, I include four approaches and compare them to a standard dictator game: involving fewer receivers than dictators, paying only some players, paying only some decisions, and role uncertainty. I also relate transfers in the dictator game variants to established complementary individual difference measures of prosociality: social value orientation, personal values, a donation to charity, and the Big Five personality factor agreeableness. My data shows that the standard dictator game presents the expected correlations with the complementary measures of prosociality. Involving fewer receivers yields comparably valid results. By contrast, when only some players or decisions are paid or, particularly, when subjects face role uncertainty, the expected associations with complementary prosociality measures are distorted. Under role uncertainty, generosity is also significantly biased upward. I conclude that the validity of dictator game outcomes is highly sensitive to the applied methods. Not all dictator game variants can be recommended for the valid measurement of social preferences.

How to elicit distributional preferences: A stress-test of the equality equivalence test

The experimental measurement of social preferences has led to somewhat equivocal results. The experimental Equality Equivalence Test proposed by Kerschbamer (2015) is a promising, simple, model-free and comprehensive tool for eliciting distributional social preferences. We here assess the validity of this method by modifying it so that we can test its key assumption: that the strength of the concern for the inactive player depends only on whether her payoff is above or below that of the decision-maker. In general, we find that this assumption holds. Moreover, the prevalence of types of social preferences that we observe is similar to that in the original paper, with selfish and quasi-maximin (Charness and Rabin 2002) being the most common.

Social preferences of future physicians

We measure the social preferences of a sample of US medical students and compare their preferences with those of the general population sampled in the American Life Panel (ALP). We also compare the medical students with a subsample of highly educated, wealthy ALP subjects as well as elite law school students and undergraduate students. We further associate the heterogeneity in social preferences within medical students to the tier ranking of their medical schools and their expected specialty choice. Our experimental design allows us to rigorously distinguish altruism from preferences regarding equality-efficiency tradeoffs and accurately measure both at the individual level rather than pooling data or assuming homogeneity across subjects. This is particularly informative, because the subjects in our sample display widely heterogeneous social preferences in terms of both their altruism and equality-efficiency tradeoffs. We find that medical students are substantially less altruistic and more efficiency focused than the average American. Furthermore, medical students attending the top-ranked medical schools are less altruistic than those attending lower-ranked schools. We further show that the social preferences of those attending top-ranked medical schools are statistically indistinguishable from the preferences of a sample of elite law school students. The key limitation of this study is that our experimental measures of social preferences have not yet been externally validated against actual physician practice behaviors. Pending this future research, we probed the predictive validity of our experimental measures of social preferences by showing that the medical students choosing higher-paying medical specialties are less altruistic than those choosing lower-paying specialties.

Shared musical knowledge in 11-month-old infants.

Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of social preferences. We randomly assigned 64 11-month-old infants to 1-2weeks' exposure to one of two novel play songs that a parent either sang or produced by activating a recording inside a toy. Infants then viewed videos of two new people, each singing one song. When the people, now silent, each presented the infant with an object, infants in both conditions preferentially chose the object endorsed by the singer of the familiar song. Nevertheless, infants' visual attention to that object was predicted by the degree of song exposure only for infants who learned from the singing of a parent. Eleven-month-olds thus garner social information from songs, whether learned from singing people or from social play with musical toys, but parental singing has distinctive effects on infants' responses to new singers. Both findings support the hypothesis that infants endow music with social meaning. These findings raise questions concerning the types of music and behavioral contexts that elicit infants' social responses to those who share music with them, and they support suggestions concerning the psychological functions of music both in contemporary environments and in the environments in which humans evolved.

The effects of induced emotions on pro-social behaviour

Emotions are commonly experienced and expressed in human societies; however, their consequences on economic behaviour have received only limited attention. This paper investigates the effects of induced positive and negative emotions on cooperation and sanctioning behaviour in a one-shot voluntary contributions mechanism game, where personal and social interests are at odds. We concentrate on two specific emotions: anger and happiness. Our findings provide clear evidence that measures of social preferences are sensitive to subjects' current emotional states. Specifically, angry subjects contribute, on average, less than happy subjects and overall welfare as measured by average net earnings is lower when subjects are in an angry mood. We also find that how punishment is used is affected by moods: angry subjects punish harsher than happy subjects, ceteris paribus. These findings suggest that anger, when induced, can have a negative impact on economic behaviour.

Can social preferences explain gender differences in economic behavior?

This study examines whether gender differences in some economic behaviors are due to differences in social preferences as measured by dictator allocation decisions. We find that, compared to men, women are significantly more likely to be inequity averters and significantly less likely to be social surplus maximizers. These differences in social preferences explain to a large extent why women send less than men in trust games. Inequity averters can ensure equal payoffs if nothing is returned by sending one-fourth of the endowment while surplus maximizers can increase total payoffs by a factor of three for each dollar sent. Social preferences also help explain the size of gifts in dictator games and choice of compensation method for simple tasks, however, after controlling for social preference type, gender is still influential in these decisions. Women give significantly more to charity than men even after accounting for our measure of social preferences. Women prefer egalitarian payment systems both because they are inequity averters and because low self-confidence may lead them to believe they will earn more with equal sharing.

Constructing Indirect Utility Models: Some Observations on the Principles and Practice of Mapping to Obtain Health State Utilities

The construction of mapping models is an increasingly popular mechanism for obtaining health state utility data to inform economic evaluations in health care. There is great variation in the sophistication of the methods utilized but to date very little discussion of the appropriate theoretical framework to guide the design and evaluation of these models. In this paper, we argue that recognizing mapping models as a form of indirect health state valuation allows the use of the framework described by Dolan for the measurement of social preferences over health. Using this framework, we identify substantial concerns with the method for valuing health states that is implicit in indirect utility models (IUMs), the conflation of two sets of respondents' values in such models, and the lack of a structured and statistically reasonable approach to choosing which states to value and how many observations per state to require in the estimation dataset. We also identify additional statistical challenges associated with clustering and censoring in the datasets for IUMs, additional to those attributable to the descriptive systems, and a potentially significant problem with the systematic understatement of uncertainty in predictions from IUMs. Whilst recognizing that IUMs appear to meet the needs of reimbursement organizations that use quality-adjusted life years in their appraisal processes, we argue that current proposed quality standards are inadequate and that IUMs are neither robust nor appropriate mechanisms for estimating utilities for use in cost-effectiveness analyses.

Too smart to be selfish? Measures of cognitive ability, social preferences, and consistency

Although there is an increasing interest in examining the relationship between cognitive ability and economic behavior, less is known about the relationship between cognitive ability and social preferences. We investigate the relationship between consequential measures of cognitive ability and measures of social preferences. We have data on a series of small-stakes dictator-type decisions, known as Social Value Orientation (SVO), in addition to choices in a larger-stakes dictator game. We also have access to the grade point averages (GPA) and SAT (formerly referred to as the Scholastic Aptitude Test) outcomes of our subjects. We find that subjects who perform better on the Math portion of the SAT are more generous in both the dictator game and the SVO measure. By contrast we find that subjects with a higher GPA are more selfish in the dictator game and more generous according to the SVO. We also find some evidence that the subjects with higher GPA and higher SAT outcomes offer more consistent responses. Our results involving GPA and social preferences complement previous work which employ measures of cognitive ability which are sensitive to the intrinsic motivation of the subject. Our results involving SAT scores are without precedent in the literature and suggest that measures of cognitive ability, which are less sensitive to the intrinsic motivation of the subject, are positively related to generosity.

Use of data on planned contributions and stated beliefs in the measurement of social preferences

In a series of one-shot linear public goods game, we ask subjects to report their contributions, their contribution plans for the next period, and their first-order beliefs about their present and future partner. We estimate subjects’ preferences from plan data by a finite mixture approach and compare the results with those obtained from contribution data. Controlling for beliefs, which incorporate the information about the others’ decisions, we are able to show that plans convey accurate information about subjects’ preferences and, consequently, are good predictors of their future behavior.

The endogenous nature of the measurement of social preferences

We present evidence against the standard assumptions that social preferences are stable and can be measured in a reliable, nonintrusive manner. We find evidence that measures of social preferences can affect subsequent behavior. Researchers often measure social preferences by posing dictator type allocation decisions. The social value orientation (SVO) is a particular sequence of dictator decisions. We vary the order in which the SVO and a larger stakes dictator game are presented. We also vary the form of the dictator game. In one study, we employ the standard dictator game, and in the other, we employ a nonstandard dictator game. With the standard dictator game, we find that prosocial subjects act even more prosocially when the SVO is administered first, whereas selfish subjects are unaffected by the order. With the nonstandard dictator game, we find evidence across all subjects that those who first receive the SVO are more generous in the dictator game but we do not find the effect among only the generous subjects. Across both dictator game forms, we find evidence that the subjects who are first given the SVO were more generous than subjects who are given the SVO last. We also find that this effect is stronger among the subjects with a perfectly consistent SVO measure. Although we cannot determine whether the order affects preferences or the measure of preferences, our results are incompatible with the assumptions that social preferences are stable and can be measured in a reliable, nonintrusive manner.

The Endogenous Nature of the Measurement of Social Preferences

We present evidence against the standard assumptions that social preferences are stable and can be measured in a reliable, nonintrusive manner. We find evidence that measures of social preferences can affect subsequent behavior. Researchers often measure social preferences by posing dictator type allocation decisions. The Social Value Orientation (SVO) is a particular sequence of dictator decisions. We vary the order in which the SVO and a larger stakes dictator game are presented. We also vary the form of the dictator game. In one study, we employ the standard dictator game, and in the other, we employ a nonstandard dictator game. With the standard dictator game, we find that prosocial subjects act even more prosocially when the SVO is administered first, whereas selfish subjects are unaffected by the order. With the nonstandard dictator game, we find evidence across all subjects that those who first receive the SVO are more generous in the dictator game but we do not find the effect among only the generous subjects. Across both dictator game forms, we find evidence that the subjects who are first given the SVO were more generous than subjects who are given the SVO last. We also find that this effect is stronger among the subjects with a perfectly consistent SVO measure. Although we cannot determine whether the order affects preferences or the measure of preferences, our results are incompatible with the assumptions that social preferences are stable and can be measured in a reliable, nonintrusive manner.

Sorting in Experiments with Application to Social Preferences

Individuals sort into and out of economic environments based on their preferences and in response to relative prices. We demonstrate the importance of such sorting for the measurement of social preferences, using two laboratory experiments. First, allowing subjects to avoid environments in which sharing is possible significantly reduces sharing. This reveals the existence of a type of individual who shares reluctantly, preferring to avoid the opportunity to share. Second, after subsidizing the sharing environment, the aggregate amount shared increases, but less is shared, on average, by those who enter. Thus, subsidies intended to induce more sharing have weak effects since they attract those who share the least. (JEL C91, D12, D64)

Too Smart to Be Selfish? Measures of Intelligence, Social Preferences, and Consistency

Although there is an increasing interest in examining the relationship between cognitive ability and economic behavior, less is known about the relationship between cognitive ability and social preferences. We investigate the relationship between significant measures of intelligence and measures of social preferences. We have data on a series of small-stakes dictator-type decisions, known as Social Value Orientation (SVO), in addition to choices in a larger-stakes dictator game. We also have access to the grade point averages (GPA) and SAT (formerly referred to as the Scholastic Aptitude Test) outcomes of our subjects. We find that subjects who perform better on the math portion of the SAT are more generous in both the dictator game and the SVO measure. By contrast we find that subjects with a higher GPA are more selfish in the dictator game and more generous according to the SVO. We also find that the consistency of the subjects is related to GPA but we do not find evidence that it is related to either portion of the SAT.

Bargaining over waiting time in ultimatum game experiments

While preference-based explanations play an increasing role in economics and sociology, the accurate measurement of social preferences deserves more attention. Most laboratory experiments measure social preferences by studying the division of “a cake that nobody had to bake” (Güth and Kliemt, 2003). This article reports results of the first ultimatum game experiment with bargaining over waiting time. The experiment was created to avoid effects of windfall gains. In contrast to donated money, time is not endowed by the experimenter and implies a natural loss to subjects. This allows for a better measurement of the inherent conflict in the ultimatum game. We implemented three anonymity conditions; one baseline condition, one condition with anonymity among subjects and one double-blind condition in which the experimenter did not know the division of waiting time. While we expected to observe less other-regarding behavior in ultimatum game bargaining over time, our experimental results rather confirm previous ultimatum game experiments, in which people bargained over money. The modal offer was half of the waiting time and only one offer was rejected. Interestingly, anonymity did not change the results significantly. In conclusion, our experiment confirms other-regarding behavior in the ultimatum game.

DO SOCIAL PREFERENCES INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY? FIELD EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM FISHERMEN IN TOYAMA BAY

In addition to showing that student measures of social preference, a concern for outcomes achieved by other reference agents, are quite different from those obtained in the field with participants who face social dilemmas in their daily lives, we find links between the social preferences of our field participants and their productivity at work. We also find that the field stock of social preferences evolves endogenously with respect to how widely team production is utilized. Because the link between productivity and social preference is strong, we provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take notice of social preferences. (JEL C93, D21, D24, H41, J24, M52, Z13)