Accountability and the fairness bias in the context of jointproduction: Effects of bonuses and opportunities

According to the accountability principle a person’s fair allocation takes into accountthe input-relevant variables she can influence, like effort, but not the variablesshe cannot influence, like a randomly assigned exogenous factor. This study is basedon a real effort-task experiment, where the exogenous influence is twofold: it comeseither as a production factor or as a bonus. We confirm that in a base treatment,i.e in absence of exogenous factors, subjects base their allocation decisions largely oneffort. When exogenous differences are present behavior changes. Whereas bonusesare largely ignored and subjects still mostly base their decisions on effort, productionfactors render allocations more selfish. Furthermore, we study whether accountabilityholds for decisions over opportunities. We apply the so-called lottery-points-method,where a binary lottery in the last experimental stage allocates the whole amount toone of the workers. We find that subjects claim more for themselves when allocatingopportunities in all treatments.