Working Paper
Prosocial Risk-Taking: Growing the Pie or Increasing your Slice?
Nina Weber
ifo Institute, Munich, 2023
ifo Working Paper No. 399
ifo Institute, Munich, 2023
ifo Working Paper No. 399
![](https://www.ifo.de/DocImg/wp-2023-399-weber-prosocial-risk-taking.jpg?c=1689236867)
Many personally risky decisions, such as innovation and entrepreneurship, have the potential to increase overall welfare by creating positive externalities for society. Rewarding such prosocial risk-taking may be an important strategy in addressing societal challenges like, for example, the climate emergency, by promoting innovation that has positive externalities for the environment. A fundamental constraint for policy makers in rewarding such behaviour are however individuals’ distributive preferences. In this paper, I provide a theoretical framework and a first experimental test of how distributive preferences are affected by potential positive externalities of risky behaviour.
Schlagwörter: Prosocial risk-taking, distributive preferences, fairness
JEL Klassifikation: D630, D620, H239, D810, C910