Essays on inequality aversion, conditional cooperation, and punishmentTools Beranek, Benjamin (2017) Essays on inequality aversion, conditional cooperation, and punishment. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractRecent developments in behavioral and experimental economics have shown that many people display other-regarding motives, in addition to self-interest. These social preferences – which include inequality aversion, conditional cooperation, and motives for punishment – make sense of a number of phenomena left unexplained by standard economic theory. This thesis is a collection of studies examining social preferences using the tools of experimental economics. Chapter 1 introduces the thesis explaining our goals and methods, as well as previewing our substantive contributions. Chapter 2 reports an experiment designed both to replicate and extend previous studies. We elicit and compare stated and revealed inequality aversion at the individual- level for subjects drawn from three different subject pools. Chapter 3 investigates whether inequality aversion, as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999), explains free riding and conditional cooperation in a public good game. Chapter 4 investigates whether observed variation in the directionality of punishment between two subject pools can be explained by the “Culture of Honor” hypothesis. Chapter 5 concludes.
Actions (Archive Staff Only)
|