Rawls (1971, 1993) suggests that a primary goods index should be the basis for interpersonal comparisons in a theory of justice, but it is well known that in general this approach is not compatible with the Pareto principle. This is the indexing impasse. Sen (1985, 1991) argues that this is...

We describe a new approach to the problem of resolving distributional conflicts between an infinite and countable number of generations. We impose conditions on the social preferences that capture the following idea: If preference (or indifference) holds between truncated paths for infinitely...

The fact that criminal behavior typically has negative consequences for others provides a compelling reason to think that criminals lack prosocial motivation. This paper reports the results from two dictator game experiments designed to study the prosocial motivation of criminals. In a lab...

Many verifiable contracts are impossible or difficult to enforce. This applies to contracts among family and friends, contracts regulating market transactions, and sovereign debt contracts. Do such non-enforceable contracts matter? We use a version of the trust game with participants from Norway...

Choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society. This paper reports the results of the first experiment, to our knowledge, to study fairness views about risktaking, specifically whether such views are based chiefly on ex ante opportunities or on ex...

Liberal egalitarian theories of justice argue that inequalities arising from non-responsibility factors should be eliminated, but that inequalities arising from responsibility factors should be accepted. This article discusses how the fairness argument for redistribution within a liberal...

In this paper, we study the role of fairness motivation in bargaining. We show that bargaining between two strongly fairness motivated individuals who have different views about what represents a fair division may end in disagreement. Further, by applying the Nash bargaining solution, we study...

Field experiments documenting positive treatment effects have a strong policy message: scale up! However, such experiments are typically implemented under close supervision of the research group in charge of the study. In contrast, scaling up would typically imply relying on local organisation....

The paper reports from an experiment studying how the aversion to lying is affected by non-economic dimensions of the choice situation. Specifically, we study whether people are more or less likely to lie when the content of the lie is personal, when they base decisions on intuition, and when...