Measuring tastes for equity and aggregate wealth behind the veil of ignorance
- Author(s)
- Jan Heufer, Jason Shachat, Yan Xu
- Abstract
We propose an instrument to measure individuals' social preferences regarding equity and efficiency behind a veil of ignorance. We pair portfolio and wealth distribution choice problems which have a common budget set. For a given bundle, the distribution over an individual's wealth is the same for both problems. The portfolio choice serves as a benchmark to evaluate whether the wealth distribution choice exhibits equity or efficiency preferring tastes. We report experiments using a within-subject design testing the veracity of this instrument. We find clusters of equity preferring, efficiency preferring, and socially agnostic individuals through reduced form, revealed preference, and structural estimation analyses.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Economics
- External organisation(s)
- Durham University, Erasmus University Rotterdam
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3285839
- Publication date
- 2018
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502057 Experimental economics
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/measuring-tastes-for-equity-and-aggregate-wealth-behind-the-veil-of-ignorance(533d6949-143e-4f39-8959-f5c46bb0d119).html