This week's Economist magazine reported an experiment where subjects could pay to decrease the income of other subjects in the experiment, which they did with some frequency, although it didn't increase their income from the experiment. The article's author suggest that this was evidence for people's desire to put others down, even when they incur the costs of doing so.
Question: How would economic theory change if we assumed that people would are trying to maximize their relative rank in a group, or had a taste for decreasing other's utility? Fabio
