title: The geometry of distributional preferences and a non-parametric identification approach: The Equality Equivalence Test.
abstract: This paper proposes a geometric delineation of distributional preference types and a non-parametric approach for their identification in a two-person context. It starts with a small set of assumptions on preferences and shows that this set (i) naturally results in a taxonomy of distributional archetypes that nests all empirically relevant types considered in previous work; and (ii) gives rise to a clean experimental identification procedure - theEquality Equivalence Test- that discriminates between archetypes according to core features of preferences rather than properties of specific modeling variants. As a by-product the test yields a two-dimensional index of preference intensity.
authors.affiliation: Department of Economics, University of Innsbruck, Universitätsstrasse 15, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria.
authors.forename: Rudolf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kerschbamer
keywords: Distributional preferences; Equality equivalence test; Other-regarding preferences; Social preferences; Social value orientations