摘要：Why is there significant political support for progressive taxation and equalizing
government transfers in western democracies? Possibilities include individual social
preferences for a less unequal distribution than what market forces alone would dictate,
demand for social insurance, or successful political coalitions to redistribute away from
the rich. We study the relative importance of fairness preferences, risk aversion, and
self-interest in determining support for redistribution through a set of experiments in
which a large number of subjects are asked to choose what level of taxation to
implement under different decision conditions and with four alternative determinants of
pre-tax income (two task-based, one random, and one based on socio-economic
background). Treatments using varying costs of redistribution to the decision-maker
and efficiency losses to recipients are used to study willingness to pay for redistribution
and concern for aggregate inefficiency. Most of our subjects prefer that there be less
inequality among others and demand for redistribution responds in predictable ways to
the cost of taxation and to the dead-weigh loss associated with it. The external validity
of the experiment is supported by the high correlation between tax decisions and
political preferences. We also find evidence that preferred levels of redistribution are
highly responsive to whether pre-tax incomes are determined according to task
performance, a trend that is much more evident among men than among women.
Comparisons between redistributive choices under different experimental conditions
provide interesting insights with regard to the relative importance of inequality
aversion and self-interest when choosing under uncertainty and when uncertainty is
resolved. In the first case, individuals' expectation about their future position in the
income distribution has a considerable impact on their tax choices. When sure of the
effect on their own earnings, subjects' tax choices are primarily governed by selfinterest,
but fairness preferences continue to play a role.
关键词：income distribution, political economy, redistribution, social preference,
experiment.
