Estimating social and nonsocial utility functions from ordinal data

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports an experiment testing two hypotheses. The first is that the value or utility associated with a payment to one's self and a payment to a co‐worker can be represented as an additive function of a utility for own payment (nonsocial utility) and a utility for the difference between own and other's payment (social utility). The second hypothesis is that changes in the amount of work accomplished by one's self and/or the other should influence the social, but not the the nonsocial utilities. Support for both hypotheses is reported.