PhD Lunch Seminars Amsterdam

Speaker(s)
Jona Linde (Uva)
Date
2010-05-18
Location
Amsterdam

We present a pilot of an experiment in which subjects make choices between three games of chance. In the social treatment games are played with three participants and in the individual treatment participants play against the computer. Games have the same probability distributions of earnings in both treatments. The experiment is designed with two goals in mind: 1) To test the suggestion that comes from a paper by Bault, Coricelli and Rustichini (2008) that when there is uncertainty people may be inequity seeking in contrast to the general finding in the social preference literature that people are inequity averse. 2) To explore whether the kind of ranking implied by the distribution is an important determinant of choice. We hypothesize that people prefer winning alone and losing together, which implies a preference for right skewed over left skewed income distributions. Joint work with Joep Sonnemans (UvA).