Background risk; Dictator games; Laboratory experiments; Economics, Econometrics and Finance (all); General Economics, Econometrics and Finance
Abstract :
[en] We investigate whether and how an individual giving decision is affected in risky environments in which the recipient’s wealth is random. We demonstrate that, under risk neutrality, the donation of dictators with a purely ex post view of fairness should, in general, be affected by the riskiness of the recipient’s payoff, while dictators with a purely ex ante view should not be. Furthermore, we observe that some influential inequality aversion preferences functions yield opposite predictions when we consider ex post view of fairness. Hence, we report on dictator games laboratory experiments in which the recipient’s wealth is exposed to an actuarially neutral and additive background risk. Our experimental data show no statistically significant impact of the recipient’s risk exposure on dictators’ giving decisions. This result appears robust to both the experimental design (within subjects or between subjects) and the origin of the recipient’s risk exposure (chosen by the recipient or imposed on the recipient). Although we cannot sharply validate or invalidate alternative fairness theories, the whole pattern of our experimental data can be simply explained by assuming ex ante view of fairness and risk neutrality.
Disciplines :
Economic systems & public economics
Author, co-author :
Beaud, Mickael; CEE-M, Univ. Montpellier, CNRS, INRA, SupAgro, Montpellier, France
Lefebvre, Mathieu ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Ecole de Gestion de l'Université de Liège ; Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, AMSE, Marseille, France
Rosaz, Julie; CEREN EA 7477, Burgundy School of Business, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Dijon, France
Language :
English
Title :
Other-regarding preferences and giving decision in a risky environment: experimental evidence
Publication date :
2022
Journal title :
Review of Economic Design
ISSN :
1434-4742
eISSN :
1434-4750
Publisher :
Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
This paper forms part of the research project RISKADAPT (Contract ANR-17-CE02-0011) of the French National Agency for Research (ANR) whose financial support is gratefully acknowledged. This work was also supported by the French National Research Agency Grant ANR-17-EURE-0020, and by the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX. It has also been supported by LabEx Entrepreneurship (Contract ANR-10-LABX-11-01). The authors would like to thank the editor and two referees for their helpful comments. They also thank participants of seminars at PSE (Paris), GATE (Lyon-Saint-Etienne) and CREM (Rennes) and the ASFEE conference 2017 (Rennes).
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