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- Promoting Justice b...
Promoting Justice by Treating People Unequally: An Experimental Study
- Autor(in)
- Erschienen
- 30. Januar 2009
- Nummer des Discussion-Papers
-
2009-008
- Schlagwort(e)
-
distributive justice
impartial behavior
procedural fairness
veil of ignorance
- Zusammenfsg.
-
Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reportsthe results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their endowments, we find impartial behavior to be a stable pattern. Subjects either compensate for initial inequalities fully or not at all in both conditions, and they do so more often when they do not know their endowment than when they know it. Moreover, the type and the size of the good to be distributed also affect the frequency of impartial behavior.
- article pub. typess JER
- Research article
- article languages JER
- Englisch
- article research fields JER
- experimental economics
- JEL-Classification for JER
- C72 - Noncooperative Games ; C92 - Laboratory, Group Behavior