We review the vast literature on social preferences by assessing what is known about their fundamental properties, their distribution in the broader population, and their consequences for important economic and political behaviors. We provide, in particular, an overview of the empirical characteristics of distributional preferences and how they are affected by merit, luck, and concerns for equality of opportunity. In addition, we identify what is known about belief-dependent social preferences such as reciprocity and guilt aversion. Furthermore, we discuss and assess the empirical relevance of self image and social image concerns in prosocial behaviors. The overall evidence indicates that a large majority of individuals have some sort of social preference, while purely self-interested subjects are a minority.
We also document the converging insights from lab and field evidence on the role of social preferences for a deeper understanding of important phenomena such as the consequences of wage inequality on work morale, employees' resistance to wage cuts, individuals' self-selection into occupations that are more or less prone to morally problematic behaviors, as well as issues of distributive politics. However, although much has been learned in recent decades, there are still many important, unresolved, yet exciting, questions waiting to be tackled.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.