Fairness Views and Cooperation Under Varying Levels of Economic Inequality

This paper investigates the impact of economic inequality on people’s perceptions of fairness and willingness to cooperate. Using experimental and survey data, we distinguish people’s injunctive perceptions of fairness from experimentally observed behavioral patterns. We find that impartial observers hold well-defined injunctive norms of fair contribution rules. Individuals with their own money at stake hold well-defined but conflicting views over fair contribution rules. We find that observed contribution patterns are less well-defined under strong inequality than under weak inequality. We observe an association between the erosion of well-defined contribution patterns and low levels of cooperation under strong inequality. Our results contribute to the debate about the behavioral consequences of income and wealth inequalities in modern societies