Identification, signaling and exploitation of social preferences: An experimental analysis

The Doctoral dissertation centers on social preferences. Three experimental studies address the identification methods and the implications of distributional preference types and pro-sociality on economic decision-making. In Chapter 1, the identification of social preference types using distributive choices is discussed. A thorough review shows that the two main approaches - parametric and non-parametric- have been productively used but produced inconsistent results in previous studies. The experiment in this Chapter is designed to examine the categorical agreement between the two methods: whether they classify the same subject into the same type. Chapter 2 presents a laboratory experiment investigating whether people strategically signal a certain type of social preferences. I consider four different distributional types and compare the distribution of these types under two settings: with and without strategic reasoning. In Chapter 3, I report an experimental study on the strategic exploitation of others' pro-sociality for own's benefit. This study is conducted within the principal-agent framework and aims to test whether employers make use of workers' pro-social motivation, offering a compensation scheme which is tailored to workers' pro-sociality.