Conditional prosocial preferences: a behavioral approach to economic allocation decisions

While on one hand many studies have determined that consumers preferences for fair economic payoffs may be conditional, few have attempted to examine what contexts are sufficient for these conditional behaviors. In three different binary dictator games, I examine preferences for fair outcomes in economic decision-making contexts and what mechanisms drive more self-interested behavior. One condition allows participants to manipulate probabilistic uncertainty, the second allows for a deferment of choice option, and the third allows for deferment and probability manipulation of choices. From data collected on the Amazon Mechanical Turk while at Dan Arielys lab at Duke University, I examine the statistical significance of the distribution of responses across three conditions and suggest that the mechanism driving more self-interested behavior may act through licensing behavior under uncertainty more than through lack of transparency.