Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/278898 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 16200
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirically identified characteristics of distributional preferences and how they are affected by merit, luck, and risk considerations as well as by concerns for equality of opportunity. In addition, we identify what is known about belief-dependent social preferences such as reciprocity and guilt aversion. The evidence indicates that the big majority of individuals have some sort of social preference while purely self- interested subjects are a minority. Our review also shows how the findings from laboratory experiments involving social preferences provide a deeper understanding of important field phenomena such as the consequences of wage inequality on work morale, employees' resistance to wage cuts, individuals' self-selection into occupations and sectors that are more or less prone to morally problematic behaviors, as well as issues of distributive politics. However, although a lot has been learned in recent decades about social preferences, there are still many important, unresolved, yet exciting, questions waiting to be tackled.
Subjects: 
social preferences
altruism
inequality aversion
image concerns
reciprocity
JEL: 
D0
D2
D9
H0
J0
P0
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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