When do people care about relative gains in trade? Much of the international relations scholarship—and much of the political rhetoric on trade—would lead us to expect support for a trade policy that benefits ourselves more than it benefits others. Yet, a large interdisciplinary literature also points to the prevalence and importance of other-regarding preferences, rendering the conventional wisdom contestable. We investigate whether and how relative gains influence trade preferences through an original survey experiment in the midst of the China–US trade war. We find that in a win-win scenario, relative gains shape trade opinion: if both sides are gaining, people want to gain more than their foreign trade partner. However, these considerations are offset in a win-lose scenario where the other side is losing out. Relative-gains considerations causally affect opinion on trade, but not in a “beggar-thy-neighbor” or even a “beggar-thy-rival” situation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of relative gains in international relations and provide the first experimental evidence that relative-gains considerations can be offset by other-regarding preferences in international trade.

人们什么时候关心贸易中的相对收益？许多国际关系学术研究——以及关于贸易的许多政治言论——将引导我们期待对一项对自己有利而不是对他人有利的贸易政策得到支持。然而，大量跨学科文献也指出了其他偏好的普遍性和重要性，使传统智慧具有争议性。我们通过中美贸易战期间的一项原始调查实验来研究相对收益是否以及如何影响贸易偏好。我们发现，在双赢的情况下，相对收益会塑造贸易观点：如果双方都受益，人们希望获得比他们的外贸伙伴更多的收益。然而，这些考虑在对方输球的输赢情况下被抵消了。相对收益的考虑会因果地影响人们对贸易的看法，但在“以邻为壑”甚至“以对手为乞”的情况下都不会。这些发现有助于我们理解相对收益在国际关系中的作用，并提供了第一个实验证据，证明相对收益的考虑可以被国际贸易中的其他方面的偏好所抵消。