«Must Reward Hard Work»? An Experiment on Personal Responsibility and Preferences for Redistribution

This study designs a laboratory experiment to investigate the link between personal responsibility and individual preferences for redistribution. We contribute to the literature by considering two key insights: first, effort is costly; second, its fruits can be grasped only in the future. Participants face a crucial trade-off between providing a costly effort or free-riding on their fellows’ effort, playing in a context where the size and the distribution of the pie depend both on circumstances beyond their control, and on their choice of working hard and voting for redistribution. Our findings suggest that people tend to reward effort: the demand for redistribution decreases when the observed average effort in the society increases and the cost of effort is higher. Moreover, people ask for less redistribution the more they are interested in the future. These results hold controlling for a number of other possible determinants of the preferences for redistribution.