Intergenerational sharing of non-renewable resources: An experimental study using Rawls's Veil of Ignorance

[Introduction ...] The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: in section 2, we argue how a counterfactual “bargaining with future individuals” situation may be realized as an experimental setup. That way, we can test the behavior of real individuals in a setting which approximates Rawls’s Original Position in which people are ignorant to which generation they will belong. Section 3 first describes related intergenerational resource sharing experiments which all focus on the descriptive level. Then, we briefly explain Frohlich/Oppenheimer’ experimental approach for deriving intragenerational distributive norms in the lab. Our intermediate conclusion is that similar “intergenerational bargaining experiment” may contribute to the derivation of intergenerational distributive norms. Section 4 describes our own experimental design and the hypotheses we test. Section 5 presents our results; section 6 concludes.