Income Redistribution and Public Good Provision: An Experiment

Maurice, Jonathan; Rouaix, Agathe; Willinger, Marc

doi:10.1111/iere.12024

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…To fill this gap in the literature, our study investigates whether and how inequalities in endowments affect contribution levels, without making reference to redistribution as in Maurice et al (2013). We present a (linear) VCM experiment, in which we compare, in a between-subject design, contributions under a symmetric, weakly asymmetric and strongly asymmetric allocation of endowments among four players with respective initial Gini coefficients of 0.000, 0.125, and 0.350.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Costs of Inequality Heterogeneous Endowments in Public-Good Experiments

et al. 2014

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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. Chair of Microeconomics, Faculty of Economic Sciences, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3, 37073 Germany Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may September 25, 2014Abstract: We compare voluntary contributions to the financing of a public good in a symmetric setting to those in asymmetric settings, in which four players have different, randomly allocated endowments. We observe that a weak asymmetry in the endowment distribution leads to the same contribution level as symmetry. Players tend to contribute the same proportion of their respective endowment. In a strongly asymmetric setting, where one player has a higher endowment than the three other players together, we observe significantly lower group contributions than in the other settings. The super-rich player does not contribute significantly more than what the others contribute on average and thus a much lower proportion of the endowment.JEL classification: C92, D63, H41.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Costs of Inequality Heterogeneous Endowments in Public-Good Experiments

et al. 2014

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“…The neutrality prediction, i.e. a small unequalizing or equalizing redistribution has no effect on group contribution -was also reported by Maurice et al (2013) who implemented a real income redistribution in their experiment. Subjects played a public good game in two consecutive sequences of 10 rounds, with two different endowment distributions: equal versus unequal (or unequal versus equal).…”

Section: Previous Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 60%

The trade-off between welfare and equality in a public good experiment

2015

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We report the results of an experiment on voluntary contributions to a public good in which we implement a redistribution of the group endowment among group members in a lump sum manner. We study the impact of redistribution on group contribution, on individuals’ contributions according to their endowment and on welfare. Our experimental results show that welfare increases when equality is broken, as predicted by theory (Itaya, De Meza & Myles, 1997), because the larger contribution of the rich subjects overcompensates the lower contribution of the poor subjects. Last but not least, agents’ behavior in situations of inequality of income, depends on initial conditions. In particular, the decisions of those who become poor seem to express a form of protest againts the new distribution of incomes: being poor is not the same thing as becoming poor

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“…public goods games when their endowments are heterogeneous (e.g., Buckley and Croson 2006, Chan et al 1996, Cherry et al 2005, Maurice et al 2013.…”

Section: Collectively Selected Under the Equal Voting Rule The Subjementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Third, a rich experimental literature has found that in situations where their resources are unbalanced, those vested with larger (smaller) resources behave more (less) selfishly (e.g., Buckley and Croson 2006, Chan et al 1996, Cherry et al 2005, Maurice et al 2013. This tension between the higher and lesser endowed members may be severe enough for them to collectively choose a more competitive environment if there is such an opportunity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Promoting Competition or Helping Less-Endowed? An Experiment on Collective Institutional Choices Under Intra-Group Inequality

Kamei

2014

SSRN Journal

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Abstract:Unequally-distributed resources, whether people's income or competence, are ubiquitous in our real world. Whether to promote competition or to lead to a more equal environment is often in question in societies or organizations. With heterogeneous endowments, we let subjects collectively choose whether to have a competitive lottery contest -where only one individual in a group wins and receives an award, generating a greater income inequality -or to have a public good that benefits the less-endowed to a greater degree. Our data indicates that highly-endowed individuals contribute little when the public good is selected. The majority of subjects, however, vote in favor of having a public good, contrary to the standard theory predictions. In addition, a belief elicitation task shows that they expect payoffs to be more equally distributed under the public good regime than under the contest regime. Moreover, the subjects' preferences between the two regimes are little affected by their risk attitudes or the size of awards in competition.These suggest that people's institutional choices are driven more by their income inequalityaverse preferences.JEL classification: C92, D04, D63, D74, H41

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Income Redistribution and Public Good Provision: An Experiment

Cited by 23 publications

References 24 publications

Social Costs of Inequality Heterogeneous Endowments in Public-Good Experiments

Social Costs of Inequality Heterogeneous Endowments in Public-Good Experiments

The trade-off between welfare and equality in a public good experiment

Promoting Competition or Helping Less-Endowed? An Experiment on Collective Institutional Choices Under Intra-Group Inequality

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