In the Solidarity game lucky winners of a lottery can transfer part of their income to unlucky losers. Will losers get smaller transfers if they can be assumed to be responsible for their zero income because they have chosen riskier lotteries? Or will risk-lovers and risk-averters favor those who made the same risk-choice, leading to larger transfers within rather than between the risk-groups? While there is support for both motives in the literature, in an experiment we find that the effect of holding people responsible for their actions is overcome by behavior guided by in-group favoritism based on different levels of risk-taking. This behavior is successfully described by a variant of the social utility function suggested by Cappelen et al. (2013).
Solidarity, Responsibility and In-Group Bias Available to Purchase
We would like to thank Hannah Liepmann, Annemarie Conrath, Alexandra Jung, Agnieszka Gryska and in particular, Claudia Vogel for helping to conduct the experiment. Yves Breitmoser provided helpful advice with respect to statistical questions and Erik Sørensen was of great help when providing access to the Cappelen et al. (2013) data and advising in computational questions. We are also thankful for comments by seminar participants in Berlin and Bergen. Remaining shortcomings are, of course, ours. An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title “Who shows solidarity with the irresponsible?”
Bolle F, Costard J (2015), "Solidarity, Responsibility and In-Group Bias". Review of Behavioral Economics, Vol. 2 No. 3 pp. 307–330, doi: https://doi.org/10.1561/105.00000036
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