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Updated: Feb 2, 2026

A System for Tracking the Dynamics of Social Preference Behavior in Small Rodents
Published on: November 21, 2019
Equality over intentionality: The normative social preferences of neutral third-parties
1Chair of Macroeconomics, Department of Economics, Berlin University of Technology, Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
This paper studies whether intentionality is more prevalent than fairness in social preferences. We do this by introducing a new three-player game in which the choices of neutral third-party arbiters are isolated from any monetary or strategic concerns. This allows us to study the normative preferences of subjects, and to compare the relative weight they give to intentions and inequality. The results show that arbiters are mainly concerned with inequality, while other's (selfish) intentions seem to play a minor role in their preferences. This result is robust to a series of experimental designs, suggesting that the role of intentions in social preferences might be smaller than implied by the previous literature.
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