Favouritism Or Fairness?: A Framed Laboratory Experiment

This paper provides laboratory experimental evidence for prevalence of organizational favouritism. It is significantly found that when subjects where put into a situation where they can offer a job to someone then the choice criteria is based on social ties rather than efficiency. Interestingly, even when subjects had the choice of giving the job to her favourite person, she prefers to give it randomly to anyone from her favoured pool, when her group size is large. Also, socio-economic factors like family structure, family occupation, social connection, caste and political connections are among the important factors in explaining the emergence of favouritism.