There is growing evidence on the roles of fairness and other-regarding preferences as fundamental human motives. Call voters with fair preferences, as in Fehr and Schmidt (1999), fair-voters. By contrast, traditional political economy models are basedon selfish-voters who derive utility solely from "own" payoff. In a general equilibrium model with endogenous labor supply, a mixture of fair and selfish voters choose optimal policy through majority voting. First, we show that majority voting producesa unique winner in pairwise contests over feasible policies (the Condorcet winner). Second, we show that a preference for greater fairness leads to greater redistribution. An increase in the number of fair voters can also lead to greater redistribution.Third, we show that in economies where the majority are selfish-voters, the decisive policy could be chosen by fair-voters, and vice versa. Fourth, while choosing labor supply, even fair voters behave exactly like selfish voters. We show how this apparently inconsistent behavior in different domains (voting and labor supply) can be rationalized within the model.
展开▼
机译：越来越多的证据表明，公平和其他方面的偏好是人类的基本动机。像费尔和施密特（Fehr and Schmidt（1999））那样，以公平的偏好召集选民。相比之下，传统的政治经济学模型是基于自私的投票者，他们仅从“自己”的收益中获得效用。在具有内生劳动力供给的一般均衡模型中，公平和自私的选民混合通过多数投票选择最优政策。首先，我们证明，在可行政策的成对竞争中，多数投票产生了一个独特的获胜者（“孔多塞”获胜者）。其次，我们表明，偏好更大的公平性会导致更大的再分配。公平选民数量的增加也可能导致更大的重新分配。第三，我们表明，在多数是自私选民的经济体中，决定性政策可以由公平选民选择，反之亦然。第四，在选择劳动力供给时，即使是公平的选民，其行为也完全像自私的选民。我们展示了如何在模型中合理化这种在不同领域（投票和劳动力供给）中明显不一致的行为。
展开▼
