On Monday, 3/3/14 at 12:00 PM in Wiedbolt 408, Shoham Choshen-Hillel will present her talk “How do people resolve the equality-efficiency trade off? Depends on who decides and who is affected.” The abstract is listed below:

The term “social preference” refers to decision makers’ satisfaction with their own outcomes and those attained by comparable others. The present research was inspired by what appears to be a discrepancy in the literature on social preferences – specifically, between a class of studies demonstrating people’s concern with inequality (e.g., Loewenstein, Thompson, & Bazerman, 1989) and other studies documenting their motivation to increase social welfare (e.g., Charness & Rabin, 2002).

We propose a theoretical framework to account for these puzzling differences. In particular, we argue that a characteristic of the decision setting – an individual’s role in creating the outcomes, referred to as agency – critically affects decision makers’ social preferences.

Namely, in settings where people merely judge outcomes (they are “non-agentic”), their concern with inequality figures prominently, whereas in settings where they determine the outcomes (they are “agentic”), their concern with the welfare of others is prominent. A series of studies employing realistic scenarios as well as a novel behavioral paradigm document a robust effect of agency on social preferences.
Food and drinks will be provided.