Positive Social Marginal Welfare Weights

In this paper, we run a large-scale incentivized experiment to understand how the generalpopulation of the U.S assigns ``social marginal welfare weights'' to other individuals in the society.These weights are general enough to capture many different fairness ideals. Our positive approachof identifying the weights assigned by the general population can help us understand the heterogeneity in people's policy views,understand why politicians' policies may be different from people's preferred policies, and guidethe evaluation ofpolicies such as taxation or cash transfers. We will present some evidence from a pilot study, which we plan to scale up in the next months.

(joint with Krishna Srinivasan, UZH)

to participate, please send an email to: crutzen@ese.eur.nl