The Role of Equality and Equity in Social Preferences

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