We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes...

Democracy is often perceived or justified as a means to realizing voters' preferences. Two major difficulties have received much attention: how to aggregate votes and how to align the interests of representatives with the preferences of voters. This paper identifies a third difficulty which...

We propose a social choice rule for aggregating preferences elicited from surveys into a marginal adjustment of policy from the status quo. The mechanism is: (i) symmetric in its treatment of survey respondents; (ii) ordinal, using only the orientation of respondents' indifference surfaces;...

We propose a social choice rule for aggregating preferences elicited from surveys into a marginal adjustment of policy from the status quo. The mechanism is: (i) symmetric in its treatment of survey respondents; (ii) ordinal, using only the orientation of respondents' indifference surfaces;...

"This paper is aimed to assess, with two lab experiments, to what extent Kőszegi and Rabin's (2006) model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences can explain Knetsch's (1989) endowment effect. Departing from past work, we design an experiment that treats the two goods (a mug and a...

A hallmark result within behavioral economics is that individuals' choices are affected by current endowments. A recent theory due to Kőszegi and Rabin (2006) explains such endowment effect with a model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. Departing from past work, we conduct...