TY - JOUR AU - Shigeoka, Hitoshi AU - Yamada, Katsunori TI - Income-comparison Attitudes in the US and the UK: Evidence from Discrete-choice Experiments JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 21998 PY - 2016 Y2 - February 2016 DO - 10.3386/w21998 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21998 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w21998.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Hitoshi Shigeoka Department of Economics Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive, WMC 4653 Barnaby, BC V5A 1S6 CANADA Tel: 778/782-5348 E-Mail: hitoshi_shigeoka@sfu.ca Katsunori (Ken) Yamada 228-3, Shin-Kami-Kosaka, Higashi-osaka City 577-0813 JAPAN E-Mail: kyamada@kindai.ac.jp AB - Economists have long been aware of utility externalities such as a tendency to compare own income with others'. If welfare losses from income comparisons are significant, any governmental interventions that alter such attitudes may have large welfare consequences. We conduct an original online survey of discrete-choice questions to estimate such attitudes in the US and the UK. We find that the UK respondents compare incomes more than US respondents do. We then manipulate our respondents with simple information to examine whether the attitudes can be altered. Our information treatment suggesting that comparing income with others may diminish welfare even when income levels increase makes UK respondents compare incomes more rather than less. Interestingly, US respondents are not affected at all. The mechanism behind the UK results seems to be that our treatment gives moral license to make income comparisons by providing information that others do so. ER -