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Promoting justice by treating people unequally: an experimental study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Alice Becker and
Luis M. Miller
Alice Becker*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute of Economics, Kahlaische Straße 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
Luis M. Miller*
Affiliation:
Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, New Road, OX1 1NF, Oxford, UK
*
e-mail: becker@econ.mpg.de
e-mail: luis.miller@nuffield.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the 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.

Keywords

Veil of ignoranceImpartial behaviorDistributive justiceProcedural fairness

JEL classification

C92: Laboratory, Group BehaviorC72: Noncooperative Games

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , December 2009, pp. 437 - 449
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2009

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-009-9222-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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