Prosocial Risk-Taking: Growing the Pie or Increasing your Slice?

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.