Social Preferences, Risk Preferences, and Distribution : Evidence from a Large Population Sample

We report on a comprehensive measurement of risk attitude in a social context and inequality attitudes in a risky context, for both gains and losses, in a large representative population sample. These measurements are of theoretical and practical importance in welfare economics and policy. We relate our attitude measurements to respondents’ distribution behavior in a separate allocation task with and without background risk. Respondents exhibit social risk aversion, inequality aversion and social risk prudence, while inequality prudence is not a predominant attitude. We find that the attitude measures have strong predictive power for behavior in the allocation task, but only weak evidence for precautionary redistribution in the presence of background risk