Children’s inequality aversion in intergroup contexts: The role of parents’ social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and moral foundations

Although children are overall sensitive to inequality and prefer fair allocation of resources, they also often display ingroup favouritism. Inquiring about the factors that can shape the tension between these two driving forces in children, we focused on the role of parents. Extending the limited literature in this field, the present work examined whether individual differences in 3-to 11-year-old White children’s (N = 154, 78 boys) evaluations of fair versus pro-ingroup behaviours in an intergroup context vary as a function of both mothers’ and fathers’ social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and moral foundations. Parents completed a questionnaire. Children were presented with a scenario in which two ingroup members distributed candies to two other children, one White and one Black, either in an egalitarian way or displaying a clear ingroup favouritism. Afterwards, their attitudes towards the two ingroup members who had distributed the candies were assessed through both an Implicit Association Test and explicit questions. Although children displayed on average an explicit preference for the fair over the pro-ingroup target, this preference did not emerge at the implicit level. Most importantly, both children’s explicit and implicit attitudes were related to mothers’ SDO, indicating that at increasing level of mothers’ SDO children’s inequality aversion tended to drop. Overall, these results emphasize the relevance of mothers’ support for social hierarchy in relation to the way in which children balance the two competing drives of equality endorsement and pro-ingroup bias.

A Model of the Interaction of Health and Healthcare for the Wellbeing of Heterogeneous Individuals

<p>A model is proposed here to investigate how the relationships between health, production, and wellbeing contribute to the achievement (or otherwise) of potential government objectives. This model uses a basic general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous individuals and two goods (healthcare and other). Public health and publically and privately provided healthcare affect health level, which in turn affects productivity. Several different potential objectives of the government agent are investigated, which determine the distribution of public healthcare. The model is solved numerically to understand the effects of the choices of government objectives including the level of inequality aversion and varying tax rates. For governments with high inequality aversion that maximise social welfare from utility, a non-zero tax rate may be optimal, even with high levels of public health.</p>

A Model of the Interaction of Health and Healthcare for the Wellbeing of Heterogeneous Individuals

<p>A model is proposed here to investigate how the relationships between health, production, and wellbeing contribute to the achievement (or otherwise) of potential government objectives. This model uses a basic general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous individuals and two goods (healthcare and other). Public health and publically and privately provided healthcare affect health level, which in turn affects productivity. Several different potential objectives of the government agent are investigated, which determine the distribution of public healthcare. The model is solved numerically to understand the effects of the choices of government objectives including the level of inequality aversion and varying tax rates. For governments with high inequality aversion that maximise social welfare from utility, a non-zero tax rate may be optimal, even with high levels of public health.</p>

Kind or contented? An investigation of the gift exchange hypothesis in a natural field experiment in Colombia

The gift exchange hypothesis postulates that workers reciprocate above market-clearing wages with above-minimum effort. This hypothesis has received mixed support in dyadic employer-worker relationships. We present a field-experimental test to assess this hypothesis in the context of a triadic relationship in which only one out of two workers receives a pay increase. We conjecture that inequality aversion motivations may thwart positive reciprocity motivations and analyze the interaction between such motivations theoretically. Across three treatments, the pay increase is justified to workers based on either relative merit or relative need or was arbitrary as no justification was offered. Two conditions in which either one or both workers receive a bonus serve as the reference. In contrast to the gift exchange hypothesis, we find that pay increases lead to a decrease in productivity. Such a decrease is most sizable in the condition where both workers receive the bonus. A post-diction of this result is that workers interpret the monetary bonus as a signal of the employer’s contentment with their effort, which makes them feel entitled to reduce their effort. In other treatments, receiving the pay increase while the coworker does not has a positive effect on productivity, especially when the pay increase is based on merit. This result is consistent with statusseekingpreferences rather than aversion against advantageous inequality. Conversely, not receiving the pay increase while the coworker does, leads to lower productivity, especially when the pay increase is assigned based on relative needs.

Accounting for Inequality Aversion Can Justify the 2◦ C Goal

Impact assessment models are a tool largely used to investigate the benefit of reducing polluting emissions and limiting the anthropogenic mean temperature rise. However, they have been often criticised for suggesting low levels of abatement. Countries and regions, that are generally the actors in these models, are usually depicted as having standard concave utility functions in consumption. This, however, disregards a potentially important aspect of environmental negotiations, namely its distributive implications. The present paper tries to fill this gap assuming that countries\regions have Fehr and Schmidt (1999) (F&S) utility functions, specifically tailored for including inequality aversion. Thereby, we propose a new method for the empirical estimation of the inequality aversion parameters by establishing a link between the well known concept of elasticity of marginal utility of consumption and the F&S utility functions, accounting for heterogeneity of countries/regions. By adopting the RICE model, we compare its standard results with the ones obtained introducing F&S utility functions, showing that, under optimal cooperation, the level of temperature rise is significantly lower in the last scenario. In particular, in the last year of the simulation, the optimal temperature rise is 2.1 ◦ C. Furthermore, it is shown that stable coalitions are easier to be achieved when F&S preferences are assumed, even if the advantageous inequality aversion parameter (altruism) is assumed to have a very low value. However, self–sustaining coalitions are far from reaching the environmental target of limiting the mean temperature rise below 2 ◦ C despite the adoption of F&S utility functions.

Behavioral Decision Making in Normative and Descriptive Views: A Critical Review of Literature

Recent studies on decision analytics frequently refer to the topic of behavioral decision making (BDM), which focuses on behavioral components of decision analytics. This paper provides a critical review of literature for re-examining the relations between BDM and classical decision theories in both normative and descriptive reviews. We attempt to capture several milestones in theoretical models, elaborate on how the normative and descriptive theories blend into each other, thus motivating the mostly prescriptive models in decision analytics and eventually promoting the theoretical progress of BDM—an emerging and interdisciplinary field. We pay particular attention to the decision under uncertainty, including ambiguity aversion and models. Finally, we discuss the research directions for future studies by underpinning the theoretical linkages of BDM with fast-evolving research areas, including loss aversion, reference dependence, inequality aversion, and models of quasi-maximization mistakes. This paper helps to understand various behavioral biases and psychological factors when making decisions, for example, investment decisions. We expect that the results of this research can inspire studies on BDM and provide proposals for mechanisms for the development of D-TEA (decision—theory, experiments, and applications).