Economics education, childhood socialization, and the transmission of allocation preferences

Abstract

This study revisits the “nature-nurture” debate in the context of attitudes towards allocation mechanisms based on query-revealed preferences. It takes into account the educative socialization during childhood. As database serves a survey among students of a medium-sized multidisciplinary university in East Germany. It is rich in variation to parallelly draw inference from field of study, gender, and collectivist, i.e. East German, socialization background. We find that allocation preferences are both a matter of economics education at the tertiary level and educative socialization during childhood.