CTESS Seminar

Abstract: Human societies are characterized by economic inequality but also inequality in social opportunities. We aim at studying how these two sources of heterogeneity interact to determine the provision of public goods. We design a lab experiment where subjects with heterogeneous wealth are placed in a network and interact strategically with their neighbors in a local public good game. We propose a novel structural estimation procedure to estimate social preferences, and find that marginal utility is asymmetric both in the dimension of monetary contributions and social spillovers. In particular, our subjects display a strong aversion to advantageous inequality in social spillovers with respect to neighbors.

This seminar is sponsored by the Center for Theoretical and Experimental Social Sciences (CTESS), which is part of The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences.