Government Efficiency, Social Choice Mechanism and Redistribution Preference:An Experimental Study on Chinese Subjects
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| Title | Government Efficiency, Social Choice Mechanism and Redistribution Preference:An Experimental Study on Chinese Subjects
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| Author | Yang Xiaolan and Zhou Yean |
| Organization | College of Economics, Zhejiang University；School of Economics, Renmin University |
| Email | yxlan@zju.edu.cn；zhouyean@ruc.edu.cn |
| Key Words | Redistribution; Government efficiency; Social choice mechanism |
| Abstract | Individual preference for income redistribution is a core issue of the redistribution policy design and its implementation. In this paper, we use Chinese subjects and the actual Chinese citizen income distribution to create a laboratory society with different income hierarchies. Subjects are required to vote twice on the social tax rate before and after they know their own income. Different levels of government tax efficiency and social choice mechanism including majority rule, randomly selected dictator, and democratic centralism which is typically used in Chinese society are introduced to our experiments. The experimental results show that tax efficiency has a positive effect on the levels of redistribution preference. Compared to the majority rule, randomly selected dictator and democratic centralism can induce higher redistribution preferences. The results also show that, after the reveal of the individual income, individual preference for redistribution is strongly dependent on one’s own income level which demonstrates the motive of self-interest. Besides, the effects of government efficiency and social choice mechanism on redistribution preference in the high income subjects group are significant different from the low income subjects group. It is suggested that in addition to the self-interest motives, inequality aversion is showed in these high income subjects, and income inequality tolerance is showed in the low-income subjects. Our results contribute to better understand the individual preferences for redistribution in China. |
| Serial Number | WP452 |
| Time | 2013-06-24 |
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