Distributional Preferences and Ego Depletion

By means of a laboratory experiment with 508 participants, we study the impact of ego depletion on revealed distributional preferences. Subjects are exposed to a social preference identification procedure in two consecutive weeks. In the treatment intervention they accomplish an ego depletion task before being exposed to the procedure in one of the two weeks, while in the control intervention they accomplish a control task. Half of the subjects are exposed to the intervention in week one and the other half in week two. Our design allows us to cleanly identify three separate effects on social preferences: i) the effect of exposing subjects to the social preference identification procedure a second time; ii) the effect of the intervention per se; and iii) the effect of ego depletion in particular. We find that only the intervention per se has an effect on social preferences for some types while the ego depletion task does not have a significant effect compared to the control task and preferences display a considerable degree of stability over time.