John R. Hamman
Assistant Professor of EconomicsSocial Preferences in Asymmetric Coordination Games
I am currently developing a project connecting my work on social preferences and coordination. I devise a novel asymmetric “battle of the sexes” game to test for strategic (collective) preferences for fairness and social welfare maximization. Charness and Rabin (2002) find that fairness concerns alone do not account for results of their distribution games but also subjects’ desire to maximize the net social welfare, even when it is costly. Using a game with two pure strategy equilibria, I vary both the inequality and net payoffs of the equilibria. Given that players prefer different equilibria, this enables me to test the willingness of each to forgo their preferred outcome to maintain coordination, and to separate fairness concerns from social welfare. The results will further illustrate how robust these individual social preferences remain under strategic interaction. Obviously, this is a work in progress. I greatly appreciate your comments.
