Individual social welfare preferences: An experimental study

•We use a modified distribution game to study individual social welfare preferences.•Over half of the subjects made choices consistent with GARP.•Subjects had a wide range of preferences for equality and efficiency.•The majority of subjects weakly prefer efficiency over equality.

This paper studies individual social welfare preferences when facing a trade-off between equality and efficiency using a modified distribution game in which subjects decide the income of two other subjects under different budgets and different “prices of equality.” We found that over half of the subjects made choices consistent with the generalized axiom of revealed preference. We then estimated individual social welfare preferences and found that the subjects had a wide range of preferences for equality and efficiency, although the majority weakly preferred efficiency over equality.