We use a large and heterogeneous sample of the Danish population to investigate the importance of distributional preferences for behavior in a trust game and a public good game. We find robust evidence for the significant explanatory power of distributional preferences. In fact, compared to twenty-one covariates, distributional preferences turn out to be the single most important predictor of behavior. Specifically, subjects who reveal benevolence in the domain of advantageous inequality are more likely to pick the trustworthy action in the trust game and contribute more to the public good than other subjects. Since the experiments were spread out more than one year, our results suggest that there is a component of distributional preferences that is stable across games and over time.

我们使用大量的丹麦人口异质样本来研究在信任博弈和公共利益博弈中分布偏好对于行为的重要性。我们发现有力的证据证明了分配偏好的重要解释能力。实际上，与二十一个协变量相比，分布偏好被证明是行为的最重要的单个预测因子。具体而言，在有利不平等领域表现出仁慈的主体比其他主体更有可能在信任博弈中采取值得信赖的行动，并为公共利益做出更多贡献。由于实验的展开时间超过一年，因此我们的结果表明，分布偏好的一个组成部分在整个游戏中以及随着时间的推移都是稳定的。