糖心原创

Title: Procedural fairness and inequality of opportunity: An experimental investigation (with Moumita Deb, Joerg Oechssler,  Stefan Trautmann and Christoph Vanberg). 

Abstract: We experimentally examine individuals’ attitudes toward unequal outcome distributions arising from procedures characterized by unequal ex-ante opportunities. Specifically, we elicit participants’ willingness to accept the realized allocations from simple two-player lottery games in which players face systematically different probabilities of winning. We hypothesize that ex post acceptance of such unequal outcomes may be influenced by two dimensions: (1) whether participation in the game is based on explicit ex ante consent versus exogenous assignment, and (2) whether individual outcome realizations are statistically independent or correlated. Our experimental results indicate that neither dimension exerts a statistically significant effect on ex-post acceptance. Acceptance rates are lower when chances are unequal, but we observe surprisingly high acceptance rates even in our biased treatments. This suggests that outcome generating mechanisms involving randomness may be perceived as fair even when they are substantially biased.