Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Interactions Between Risk, Cooperative Experience, and Distribution Preferences

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Experimental games have become a powerful tool in social science. The underlying idea is simple: they aim to translate the salient features of real world situations into controllable laboratory environments. Behavior in the laboratory can provide insights into how things will play out in the real world by showcasing what people value and how they reason. Moreover, a laboratory environment enables investigators to tailor experiments, examining hypotheses for which the real world offers little data and manipulating unique parameters relevant to decision making. For a government agency in charge of auctioning off broadband licenses or for a business like Ebay it is obviously valuable to know, for example, if certain auction rules tend to benefit buyers or sellers. Laboratory games are clearly useful for developing such knowledge.However, what makes a laboratory game sufficiently similar to the real world, such that one is entitled to think that results obtained in the former have any relevance to the latter? This is the subject of a serious debate within the social science community. Two recent findings have highlighted the complexity of the issues involved. One experiment showed that individuals played economic games in systematically different ways based on whether or not they thought the other players in the game were acting voluntarily. This is one of many findings that suggest that "intentional contexts," which are difficult to control for in conventional game structure, may nonetheless exert enormous influence on behavior. Another experiment showed that people's preference for "risk," which is an extremely important concept in politics and economics, differed across various auction institutions. This suggests that people?s preferences may depend on the institutions that elicit them - another finding that would severely qualify the applicability of many experimental results to real world issues.The study proposed here uses a novel experimental protocol to examine a question of substantial public concern: what is the nature of preferences for wealth distribution? The political philosopher John Rawls famously made such preferences a cornerstone of his theory of justice. However, experiments aimed at understanding these preferences have come up with various conflicting results, not only cross culturally and cross subject pool, but also within subjects over time. In addition to presenting a behavioral puzzle, this raises serious questions about the democratic nature of any program of distributive justice. Building on the recent findings mentioned above, the present study employs unique controls for both risk preference and cooperative intentionality in order to better understand wealth sharing preferences. Moreover, these controls promise to grant new insight into the relevance of intentional and institutional contexts for experimental games, which would be a significant methodological advance in itself. Most importantly, the results may illuminate the nature and role of normative ideals in economic behavior and pose further questions about possibility of persuasively transforming them.In this experiment, two independent groups first participate in iterations of an identical, noncompetitive lottery-auction game for individual rewards. The first group proceeds to play iterations of two competitive auction games, also for individual rewards. The second group, however, plays the noncompetitive game again, and in each iteration all players receive the highest payoff achieved by any individual player. This both encourages riskier individual play and gives subjects the experience of increased earnings through the collective bearing of risk, whereas in the first pool smaller rewards are earned in competition with others. Finally, members of each group arepresented with lottery tickets and, before they "scratch" them, are asked to vote on whether they want the winnings to be divided equally amongst the group members (the "Rawlsian option"), or retained by the individuals who get lucky.This experimental design enables the investigation of three questions, viz: 1) Are earlier findings about the institutional effects on risk preference replicated for larger sized groups, 2) On an individual level do risk preferences elicited by particular auctions predict preferences for sharing the final lottery, 3) Does the experience of cooperative earnings and risk sharing dispose members of the second group to prefer sharing the final lottery more than the first? Answering the first question will establish in more general terms the remarkable finding that certain preferences depend on the institutions that elicit them. If institutions matter in this way, game theorist must be much more cautious about extrapolating from preferences derived in laboratory settings to various real world environments. Answers to the second question will suggest whether there are distinct classes of risk preference as well as whether general risk aversion is a good way of explaining "Rawlsian" preferences. Answers to the third question will not only suggest whether past intentional/institutional experiences can shape preferences for wealth distribution, but also establish the relevance of intentional/institutional contexts for behavior more generally. This investigation thus promises to further understanding both of preferences related to distributive justice as well as the relevance of intentional and institutional contexts for economic behavior at large.