The goal of this paper is to link attitude toward risk over personal consumption with attitude toward risk over social consumptions. Because many everyday choices involve risk, these attitudes enter virtually every realm of individual decision-making. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for deducing preferences over risky social choices (which have consequences both for the Decision Maker and for others) from risky personal choices (which have consequences only for the Decision Maker) and riskless social choices, and we offer an experimental test of the theory. The experiments generate a rich dataset that enables completely non-parametric revealed preference tests of the theory at the level of the individual subject. Many subjects behave as predicted by the theory but a substantial fraction do not.

This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with demographics such as age and religiosity and are predictive of many left-wing political views, albeit in culturally highly heterogeneous ways. Across countries, universalism is strongly linked to a broader radius of trust. Looking at origins, universalism varies with the economic, political, and religious organization of societies in ways that are consistent with the idea that the scope of altruism is partly shaped by economic incentives and democracy.

A main focus in economics is how to design optimal policies in second-best situations, which often requires a trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and others less than they deserve, false negatives. This paper provides novel evidence on people’s second-best fairness preferences from large-scale experimental studies in the United States and Norway. The majority of people are more concerned with false negatives than with false positives, but we document substantial heterogeneity in second-best fairness preferences between the countries and across the political spectrum. The findings shed light on the political economy of social insurance and redistribution.

There are striking differences in inequality and redistribution between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there are corresponding differences in social preferences, we conducted a large-scale international social preference experiment where Americans and Norwegians make distributive choices in identical environments. Combining the infrastructure of an international online labor market and that of a leading international data collection agency, we show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. We also provide causal evidence suggesting that fairness considerations are more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations.

The principle that people should be held personally responsible for the consequences of their choices is a fundamental moral ideal in Western societies. We report from a large-scale experimental study of how far-reaching this principle is for inequality acceptance. We show that third-party spectators violate minimal conditions for a morally relevant choice when making redistributive decisions for two workers. They accept more inequality when the workers have made nominal and forced choices than when brute luck is the source of inequality. We argue that our findings shed light on important current political debates about personal responsibility and redistributive policies.

This paper investigates fairness perceptions of extreme income inequality generated in winner-take-all competitions. Two large-scale experiments with more than 7,000 participants from the general population of the U.S. show that extreme earnings inequality is widely accepted, even when the winner only slightly outperforms the runner-up. The effect of the winning margin on inequality acceptance is modest compared to the effect of shifting the source of inequality from luck to winning by the smallest possible margin. The experimental choices are systematically associated with broader fairness attitudes and policy preferences, including support for higher taxation of top earners and redistributive economic policy.

We exploit a unique data set, combining rich experimental data with high-quality administrative data, to study dropout from the college track in Norway, and why boys are more likely to drop out. The paper provides three main findings. First, we show that family background and personal characteristics contribute to explain dropout. Second, we show that the gender difference in dropout rates appears both when the adolescents select into the college track and after they have started. Third, we show that different processes guide the choices of the boys and the girls of whether to drop out from the college track.