Some Simple Tests of Social Preferences

Departures from pure self-interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of “social preferences”. We conduct experiments on simple games that test these theories more directly than the array of games conventionally considered. Our experiments show support for the prevalence of “quasi-maximin” preferences: People are self interested, but also sacrifice to increase the payoffs for all recipients, especially low-payoff recipients. We show that quasimaximin preferences better capture behavior than recently proposed models that posit an aversion to differences in payoffs. People are also motivated by reciprocity: While there is little evidence of sacrifice to reciprocate good behavior beyond what they would sacrifice for neutral parties, they withdraw willingness to sacrifice to achieve a fair outcome when others are themselves unwilling to sacrifice, and sometimes punish unfair behavior. We propose some simple models based on our experimental results.