Acceptance of Distributional Axioms: Experimental Findings

Abstract

This paper is an empirical study of the acceptability of distributional axioms. Data from five German universities were used to analyze attitudes with respect to the anonymity postulate, relative and absolute income inequality aversion (tests of the acceptability of scale and translation invariance), specific transfer affinities, and replication aversion (the population principle). This paper represents an innovation in the analysis of perception of distributional equality in that it offers more comprehensive and conclusive results as to the statistical consistency of test responses, introduces a test of the anonymity postulate and, finally, uses combinations of some of these responses to express more complex perceptions of income distributional inequalities in the form of inequality attitudes.

Although the acceptance rate of the anonymity principle was not as high as we expected, anonymity was confirmed the strongest when compared with all other axioms. By contrast, other results show a lower acceptance rate, such as in the case of constant relative inequality aversion and decreasing absolute inequality aversion (41 % and 53 %, respectively). Combinations of these attitudes showed the prevelance of centrist inequality attitudes among our test populations (18 %), especially when an income-shock effect was introduced (27 %). Further analysis revealed the rather strong rejection of the transfer principle, (72 %), although not among supporters of traditional views of scale invariance. The most surprising finding in our study, however, is the rather strong rejection of the population principle (61 %).

The authors are indebted to Gerald Wogatzki and Bernd Theilen for statistical and computer support and to Kai Marcus Bickel, Marion Bielawa, Frauke Huber, Anja Joswig, and Wiebke Malach for database support. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to those collegues who helped to collect data from other universities.