Field Paper
Thank you for your interest in my 2nd year field paper! You can find the latest draft and poster below.
The Interaction between Social Preferences, Communication, and Inequality: Model and Experiment
with Kristian López Vargas | [Draft] | [Poster]
In the absence of information transmission, how does communication affect voter behavior? We propose a model where agents can persuade others by shaping their social preferences. This can reinforce inequality and generate a suboptimal size of the public sector. We then design a laboratory experiment to test how a society with unequal wealth distribution would engage in communication about a tax policy.
Abstract
In the absence of information transmission, how does communication affect voter behavior? We propose a model where agents can persuade others by shaping their social preferences. We incorporate the competing notions of inequality aversion, efficiency, and fairness into agents' distributional preferences. In a public goods-like game, we demonstrate that when messaging is costly, and initial wealth distribution is highly unequal, the inequality is perpetuated by efficiency-driven messages from wealthier agents. We design a laboratory experiment to test how such limited access to communication shapes participant's social preferences, conditioned on the perceived fairness of the initial distribution (luck or effort), the varying cost of messages (free or costly), and the presence of identity cues (revealed or hidden).