← Search

Linking Social and Personal Preferences: Theory and Experiment

William R. Zame¹; Bertil Tungodden²; Erik Ø. Sørensen²; Shachar Kariv³; Alexander W. Cappelen²

¹ University of California, Los Angeles · ² Norwegian School of Economics · ³ University of California, Berkeley

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. JEL Classification Numbers: C91, D63, D81.

DOI

10.1086/739832

Volume

134 (6)

Pages

1890-1930

Language

en

Export

BibTeX

Sources

semanticscholar openalex crossref