Search

• We study the level of intergenerational transmission of democratic values eliciting preferences for social choice rules that aggregate individual preferences into a collective decision. • This is relevant because a high intergenerational transmission of democratic values would increase the stability of political institutions. • We run an experiment with 186 students and their parents and elicit their preferences in three different profiles. We estimate a panel data discrete choice model. • Our results indicate a significant intergenerational transmission of preferences for social choice rules. We study whether democratic values that govern the preferences over social choice rules are subject to intergenerational transmission. We focus on five social choice rules, namely, Plurality, Plurality with Runoff, the Majoritarian Compromise, Borda Rule and Social Compromise, that represent very diverse values about how to extract public will out of individual opinions. In our experiment, students and their parents are confronted with hypothetical preference profiles and are asked to decide which alternative should be chosen for the society. The design of the hypothetical preference profiles allows us to interpret a subject's choice of an alternative as her revealed preference for one of the focused social choice rules. We find significant differences between the rules most often chosen by the parents (Majoritarian Compromise and Plurality) and those by the students (Social Compromise). Analyzing the relation between the preferences over social choice rules for each parent-offspring pair, we find support for the hypothesis of parental transmission of preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper uses subjects’ diverse self-reported justifications to explain discrepancies between observed heterogeneous behavior and the unique equilibrium prediction in a one-shot traveler''s dilemma experiment. Principal components analysis suggests that iterative reasoning, aspiration levels, competitive behavior, attitudes towards risk and penalties and focal points may be behind different choices. Such reasons are coherent with same subjects’ behavior in other tests and experiments in which these particular issues are prominent, and thus, we identify “types” of subjects. Overall, we conclude that subjects’ self-justifications in complex strategic situations contain informational value which may be used to predict behavior in other situations of economic importance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]