Do You Envy Others Competitively or Destructively? An Experimental and Survey Investigation

Envy is evident when an agent undertakes a costly effort to reduce the gap between his situation and the envied others' situation. This attempt can take two paths. An agent characterized by competitive or white envy is willing to incur a cost in order to keep up with the Joneses' situation. An agent characterized by destructive or black envy is willing to incur a cost in order to push the others downwards. Using experiments and survey data, we show (1) that people exhibit competitive and destructive forms of envy and (2) that the dominant form of envy varies across domains. A major implication is that underdevelopment may be partly due to destructive envy.