Decisions about how to share resources with others often need to be taken under uncertainty regarding its allocational consequences. Although risk preferences are likely important, existing research is silent about how social and risk preferences interact in such situations. In this paper we provide experimental evidence on this question. In a first experiment givers are not exposed to risk while beneficiaries' final earnings may be larger or smaller than the allocation itself, depending on the realized state of the world. In a second experiment, risk affects the earnings of givers but not of beneficiaries. We find that individuals' risk preferences are predictive for giving inThe research documented in this paper was partly financed by the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (project number 11429) and also received financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) (project number 400-09-451). Uncertain (2017) 55:95-118 both experiments. Increased risk exposure of beneficiaries tends to decrease giving whereas increased risk exposure of givers has no effect. We propose a simple nonlinear generalization of a model allowing for other-regarding preferences, ex-post and ex-ante fairness, and risk aversion. We find some support for it in our data when risk is on the beneficiaries' side but less so when risk is on the givers' side. Our results point to the importance of the further development of models of social preferences that also incorporate risk preferences. Electronic supplementary material

No abstract

No abstract

We develop an index of competitiveness and cooperativeness that is based on the primitives of a normal-form game, i.e., players, strategies and payoffs. The index relies on the unique decomposition of a given game into a zero-sum game and a common interest game. The index decreases in the distance to its zero-sum part and increases in common interest part. The comparative statics of our index coincide with economic intuition. The index also supports experimental findings in well-known classes of games in the sense that more cooperative and less competitive behavior correlates with lower values of the index. (JEL C71, C72)

We develop an index of competitiveness and cooperativeness which is based on the primitives of a normal-form game, i.e., players, strategies and payoffs. The index relies on a unique decomposition of a given game into a zero-sum game and a common-interest game. The index decreases in the distance to its zero-sum part and it increases in the distance to its common-interest part. Alternatively, the index increases if the share of variation in payoffs captured by the zero-sum part increases. We compute our index for well-known classes of games such as Prisoner's Dilemma, games with Strategic Complements and Substitutes, All-pay auctions, Tullock contests, and Public Goods games. The comparative statics of our index coincide with economic intuition. The index does well in explaining experimental findings in the sense that more cooperative and less competitive behavior correlates with lower values of the index.