Premium
Testing Social Preferences for an Economic “Bad”: An Artefactual Field Experiment *
Author(s) -
Keisner Deborah Kerley,
Messer Kent D.,
Schulze William D.,
Zarghamee Homa
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
the scandinavian journal of economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.725
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1467-9442
pISSN - 0347-0520
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9442.2012.01745.x
Subject(s) - social preferences , voting , economics , commodity , microeconomics , test (biology) , field (mathematics) , social choice theory , experimental economics , empirical research , preference , political science , market economy , paleontology , philosophy , mathematics , epistemology , politics , pure mathematics , law , biology
We test for social preferences over a commodity in an artefactual field experiment using the random price voting mechanism. Subjects are university staff members, and the commodity is water “contaminated” by a sterilized cockroach. Our results suggest that social preferences exist with respect to commodities and “bads”, supporting a more general utility framework for social preferences. Our empirical test allows for the coexistence of three social‐preference models; our results support the models of Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and Charness and Rabin (2002), but not the model of Bolton and Ockenfels (2000). Also, we find that incorporating social preferences improves the efficiency of majority‐rules voting.