Measuring tastes for equity and aggregate wealth behind the veil of ignorance

We propose an instrument to measure individuals' social preferences regarding equity and efficiency behind a veil of ignorance while controlling for idiosyncratic risk preferences. We construct a battery of portfolio and wealth distribution choice problems sharing a common budget set. A given bundle induces the same distribution over an individual's wealth in both problems. The portfolio choice solely reflects an individual's risk attitude, providing a benchmark to evaluate whether their wealth distribution choice exhibits equity or efficiency preferring tastes. Our experiments show clusters of social preference types, which are unexpectedly independent of risk preferences.