Responsibility for what? Fairness and individual responsibility

What should individuals be held responsible for? This is a fundamental question in much of the contemporary debate on distributive justice. Different fairness ideals, such as strict egalitarianism, and different versions of equal opportunity ethics and libertarianism give different answers to this question. In order to study the prevalence of these fairness ideals in society, we present the results from a dictator game where the distribution phase is preceded by a production phase. Each participant's contribution is a result of working time, productivity and price. We estimate what factors the participants hold each other responsible for and the weight they attach to fairness. In addition, we discuss how fairness preferences relate to business education and labour market experiences by comparing the estimates for business students at different stages of their education, and by comparing the estimates for final-year business students with the estimates for former business students with some years of work experience.

[1]  T. Piketty,et al.  Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics , 1995 .

[2]  R. Nozick.  Anarchy, State, and Utopia , 1975, Princeton Readings in Political Thought.

[3]  A. Alesina,et al.  Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities , 2001 .

[4]  N. Wilcox.  Stochastic models for binary discrete choice under risk: a critical primer and econometric comparison , 2008 .

[5]  Matthew L. Spitzer,et al.  The Coase Theorem: Some Experimental Tests , 1982, The Journal of Law and Economics.

[6]  Martin Strobel,et al.  Inequality Aversion, Efficiency, and Maximin Preferences in Simple Distribution Experiments , 2002 .

[7]  Alexander W. Cappelen,et al.  The Pluralism of Fairness Ideals: An Experimental Approach , 2005, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[8]  Ronald Dworkin,et al.  What is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources , 1981 .

[9]  Janet L. Yellen,et al.  Why Doesn't the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? , 2001 .

[10]  John H. Miller,et al.  NOTES AND COMMENTS GIVING ACCORDING TO GARP: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF THE CONSISTENCY OF PREFERENCES FOR ALTRUISM , 2002 .

[11]  Marco Faravelli,et al.  How context matters: A survey based experiment on distributive justice , 2007 .

[12]  Bruno S. Frey,et al.  Selfish and Indoctrinated Economists? , 2005 .

[13]  R. Frank,et al.  Do Economists Make Bad Citizens , 1996 .

[14]  Alberto Alesina,et al.  Fairness and redistribution , 2005 .

[15]  N. Frohlich,et al.  Modeling Other-Regarding Preferences and an Experimental Test , 2004 .

[16]  N. Wilcox.  Stochastically more risk averse: A contextual theory of stochastic discrete choice under risk , 2011 .

[17]  Todd L. Cherry,et al.  The Impact of Endowment Heterogeneity and Origin on Public Good Contributions: Evidence From the Lab , 2005 .

[18]  Todd L. Cherry,et al.  Hardnose the Dictator , 2002 .

[19]  J. Roemer,et al.  Equality of Opportunity , 2013 .

[20]  Kenju Akai,et al.  Morals and Mores? Experimental Evidence on Equity and Equality from the US and Japan , 2008 .

[21]  Bronwyn H Hall,et al.  Estimation and Inference in Nonlinear Structural Models , 1974 .

[22]  James Andreoni,et al.  Giving According to GARP , 2001 .

[23]  James Konow,et al.  Fair Shares: Accountability and Cognitive Dissonance in Allocation Decisions , 2000 .

[24]  E. Fehr.  A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation , 1998 .

[25]  Jeremy Clark,et al.  Free-Riding and the Provision of Public Goods in the Family: A Laboratory Experiment , 2004 .

[26]  Colin Camerer.  Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction , 2003 .

[27]  K. Arrow,et al.  Meritocracy and Economic Inequality , 2001 .

[28]  Ruben Durante,et al.  Preferences for Redistribution and Perception of Fairness: An Experimental Study , 2009 .

[29]  Jeremy Clark.  Fairness in Public Good Provision: An Investigation of Preferences for Equality and Proportionality , 1998 .

[30]  Christopher Ferrall,et al.  Solving Finite Mixture Models: Efficient Computation in Economics Under Serial and Parallel Execution , 2005 .

[31]  David L. Dickinson,et al.  An Experimental Examination of Labor Supply and Work Intensities , 1999, Journal of Labor Economics.

[32]  Colin Camerer,et al.  Foundations of Human Sociality - Economic Experiments and Ethnographic: Evidence From Fifteen Small-Scale Societies , 2004 .