No begging, no money? Experimental Analysis of Procedural Preferences for Redistribution

The experimental literature on pro-social behavior has been largely focused on settings where the decision of donors is sufficient for an interaction to occur. However, in many real-life applications recipients first have to ask donors for help to initiate the transaction. We suggest that recipients and donors might have different preferences over these redistribution procedures and test this proposition in a laboratory experiment. We let participants play a dictator game under two procedures: (1) a dictator first chooses a transfer, and the recipient then decides to accept or reject it; (2) recipient first decides to ask or not for a transfer, and if asked the dictator then chooses a transfer which can be accepted or rejected by the recipient. First, we find that a minority of recipients shy away from “begging”, but happily accept the transfer initiated by dictators. Second, while the majority of recipients prefer asking dictators to share, dictators share much less under this experimental procedure.