Social costs of inequality: Heterogeneous endowments in public-good experiments
2014 | working paper
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Details
- Authors
- Keser, Claudia ; Markstädter, Andreas; Schmidt, Martin; Schnitzler, Cornelius
- Abstract
- We compare voluntary contributions to the financing of a public good in a symmetric setting to those in asymmetric settings, in which four players have different, randomly allocated endowments. We observe that a weak asymmetry in the endowment distribution leads to the same contribution level as symmetry. Players tend to contribute the same proportion of their respective endowment. In a strongly asymmetric setting, where one player has a higher endowment than the three other players together, we observe significantly lower group contributions than in the other settings. The super-rich player does not contribute significantly more than what the others contribute on average and thus a much lower proportion of the endowment.
- Issue Date
- 2014
- Publisher
- CeGE
- Series
- Discussion Papers (Center for European, Governance and Economic Development Research)
- Language
- English