An experimental study on individual choice, social welfare, and social preferences

We experimentally study subjects’ compliance with dominance relationships of income distributions in a ranking task. The experiment consisted of four different treatments: Lottery, individual choice, social preferences, and social planner. Our results suggest that peopleʹs risk attitudes do not adequately reflect their inequality attitudes. Uninvolved social planners exhibit randomization preferences, while self-interested social planners are generally more inequality averse and try to avoid extreme outcomes.