Jumping the queue: An experiment on procedural preferences

We present a three-player queuing game to study procedural preferences in a laboratory experiment. Together with markets, queues and waiting lists are universal procedures for allocating goods and services. We designed our queuing game to disentangle motivations of outcome-oriented egoistic preferen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGames and economic behavior Vol. 102; pp. 127 - 137
Main Authors Dold, Malte, Khadjavi, Menusch
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Inc 01.03.2017
Subjects
Inequality aversion
Laboratory experiment
Procedural preferences
Queuing
D63
A12
Inequality aversion
C91
Procedural preferences
Queuing
Laboratory experiment
B41
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Summary:We present a three-player queuing game to study procedural preferences in a laboratory experiment. Together with markets, queues and waiting lists are universal procedures for allocating goods and services. We designed our queuing game to disentangle motivations of outcome-oriented egoistic preferences, outcome-oriented distributional (inequality aversion) preferences and outcome-independent procedural preferences. In a series of treatments, we introduce a market element and allow two of the three players to bargain over a queue jump, thus violating the queuing procedure. A third player is able to engage in peer punishment to sanction queue jumping. We provide evidence that a simple model of procedural preferences is able to explain the behavior of a share of the subjects in our experiment.
ISSN:0899-8256
1090-2473
DOI:10.1016/j.geb.2016.12.002