Redistributive Choices and Income Inequality: Experimental Evidence for Income as a Signal of Deservingness

Gee, Laura K.; Migueis, Marco; Parsa, Sahar

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2746019

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Buser and Dreber, 2015). The effect seems to be mainly driven by those who (1) win the competition (comparable to Schurr and Ritov, 2016;Gee et al, 2016), (2) are more inequality averse, (3) usually work in teams, and (4) are unaware of the existing bonus system. However, when there is less at stake, competition does not affect prosociality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

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Competition and Prosociality: A Field Experiment in Ghana

2017

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Competitive bonuses are commonly used to promote higher productivity in the workplace. Yet, these types of incentives could have negative spillovers on coworkers' prosocial behavior in subsequent tasks. To investigate this question, we conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in Ghana. In a between-subjects design, participants complete a real-effort task under a competitive, threshold, or random payment while holding payment differentials constant across treatments. Before and after, we measure prosociality through a public goods and a social value orientation game. Competition reduces prosociality when the dispersion of payments is high. However, when there is less at stake, competition does not affect prosociality.JEL Codes: C93, D03, J33

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

“…This suggests that competition indeed has a distinct effect on winners, which is not only due to higher income. This also relates to Gee et al (2016) who find that when income is earned through performance, individuals use income differences as a heuristic to infer relative deservingness.…”

Section: Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Competition and Prosociality: A Field Experiment in Ghana

2017

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“…More recently, the literature has extended this insight to situations that involve group voting over redistribution. In particular, both Krawczyk (2010) and Gee, Migueis and Parsa (2015) show that there is less voting for redistribution in situations where reward disparities match with skill or effort differences rather than being driven by luck. Finally, Lefgren, Sims and Stoddard (2016) show that both rich and poor voters favor more redistribution when everyone exerts equal effort than when the rich exert more effort than the poor.…”

Section: A Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

The other 1%: Class Leavening, Contamination and Voting for Redistribution

Lefgren¹,

Sims²,

Stoddard³

2018

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We perform an experiment to measure how changes in the effort exerted by a small fraction of a low-reward group affect the willingness of the high-reward group to vote for redistributive taxation. We find that a substantial fraction of high reward subjects vote in favor of greater redistribution when a very small fraction of high-effort individuals is added to a pool of otherwise low-effort poor. Contaminating a group of high-effort poor with a small number of low-effort individuals causes the most generous rich subjects to vote for less redistribution. These results suggest that anecdotes about the deservedness of a small group of transfer recipients may be effective in changing support for redistribution. We find large gender differences in the results. Relative to men, women respond three times more strongly to the existence of high-effort individuals among the poor. This behavior may help explain gender differences in support for redistribution more generally.

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Equality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous Populations

2015

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E S Equality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous PopulationsIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 9384 September 2015 ABSTRACTEquality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous Populations * Mechanisms to overcome social dilemmas provide incentives to maximize efficiency. However, often -such as when agents are heterogeneous -there is a trade-off between efficiency and equality. Agents' concerns for equality in such instances can limit the ability of mechanisms to promote efficiency. We provide evidence for this from a public good experiment using a simple mechanism which allows individuals to communicate periodically with other group members and reward them for their actions. We show that, in homogeneous populations -where there is no tension between efficiency and equality -the mechanism permits group to obtain maximum efficiency. This is not the case in heterogeneous populations where individuals derive different benefits from cooperation. Although almost all heterogeneous groups agree to follow specific contribution rules with positive contributions, most of them either prioritize equality over efficiency or strike a compromise between the two. These findings suggest that equality concerns can impose limits on the ability of heterogeneous populations to reach efficient outcomes through self-governance.JEL Classification: C92, H41, D74

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Redistributive Choices and Income Inequality: Experimental Evidence for Income as a Signal of Deservingness

Cited by 3 publications

References 49 publications

Competition and Prosociality: A Field Experiment in Ghana

Competition and Prosociality: A Field Experiment in Ghana

The other 1%: Class Leavening, Contamination and Voting for Redistribution

Equality Concerns and the Limits of Self-Governance in Heterogeneous Populations

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