The Role of Equality and Efficiency in Social Preferences

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversionnin simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference fornefficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important thanninequity aversion. We show that these results are partly based on a strong subject poolneffect. The participants of the E&S experiments were undergraduate students of economicsnand business administration who self-selected into their field of study (economics) andnlearned in the first semester that efficiency is desirable. We show that for non-economistsnthe preference for efficiency is much less pronounced. We also find a non-negligiblengender effect indicating that women are more egalitarian than men. However, perhapsnsurprisingly, the dominance of equality over efficiency is unrelated to political attitudes.