This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine social preferences in various economic contexts.
In the first chapter, we provide a theoretical approach for investigating attitudes towards intertemporal inequality. We generalize the Pigou-Dalton principle to intertemporal settings by formulating several partial orders on the space of income streams. Three of the partial orders account for payments received over the lifespan of the stream and differ only by how intensely one stream dominates another. A fourth partial order only accounts for the level of inequality experienced in a specific period, rather than over the lifespan of the stream. We then perform a laboratory experiment to distinguish the empirical relevance of these different partial orders and inequality rankings. We find that orders that rank whole streams accurately reflect how participants view streams for themselves, but these views do not translate into how they choose for others. Instead, many of our participants display inequality aversion based on period-wise outcomes.
In the second chapter, we study when it is possible to link a social planner’s preferences across groups of different agents. We propose a preference consistency criterion that relates members of a family of social preferences across domains of different agents; this criterion requires preferences to be identical on domains differing only by adding agents with choice-independent payoffs. We derive additional domain changes for which consistent preferences are invariant, and test adherence to these predictions in an online laboratory experiment. While consistency rates are reasonably high, we document significant differences in consistency across the different types of domain changes. Additionally, we find that participants tend to choose options with higher inequality/lower inefficiency as domain size increases.
In the third chapter, we use large language models (LLMs) for representing human behavior, as a mean to bypass confidentiality constraints. We show that LLMs demonstrate behavior agreeing with real human subjects regarding social choice consistency. Moreover, we investigate the impact of environmental factors on social choice consistency, emphasizing the sensitivity of social choices to changes in the surrounding context, such as the presence of close friendships and shared characteristics among participants.
