The Role of Equality and Efficiency in Social Preferences

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) claim that a combination of
efficiency seeking and minmax preferences dominates inequity
aversion in simple dictator games. This result relies on a strong
subject pool effect. The participants of their experiments were
undergraduate students of economics and business administration who
self-selected into their field of study and learned early on that
efficiency is desirable. We show that for non-economists the
preference for efficiency is much less pronounced. We also find a
gender effect indicating that women are more egalitarian than men.
However, perhaps surprisingly, the dominance of equality over
efficiency is unrelated to political attitudes.