Choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society, but there is probably no more contentious question of justice than how to allocate the gains and losses that inevitably result from risky choices. This paper reports the results from the first...

It is a central political goal to secure disabled individuals the same opportunities as others to pursue their conception of a good life. This goal reflects an ambition to combine an egalitarian and a liberal moral intuition. In this paper we analyze how disabled individuals who take part in...

This paper studies how individual behavior is affected by moral reflection in a dictator game with production, and the informational value of self-reported data on fairness. We nd that making individuals reflect on fairness before they play the dictator game has a moderate effect on the weight...

In this paper we analyse how fairness considerations, in particular considerations of just income distribution, affect whether or not people find tax evasion justifiable and their willingness to evade taxes. Using data from the Norwegian “Hidden Labour Market Survey” we show that individuals...

We study whether compensating people who volunteer to be leaders in a public goods game creates a social crowding-out effect of moral motivation among the others in the group. We report from an experiment with four treatments, where the base treatment is a standard public goods game with...

A number of experimental studies have found that females are more competitively inclined than males, and it has been argued that this difference potentially can explain a wide range of real world economic phenomena, including observed gender differences in labor markets (Balafoutas and Sutter, 2012;...

In a novel experimental design with nearly 10,000 adults and children, we study how adults in two societies characterized by very different levels of income inequality, Shanghai (China) and Norway, make real distributive choices involving children. We document a large cross-societal difference...

Meritocracy is a prominent fairness view in many societies, but often difficult to apply because there is limited information about the source of inequality. This paper studies theoretically and empirically how limited information affects inequality acceptance. We connect the literatures on...

In many important economic settings, limited information makes it impossible for decision makers to ensure that each individual gets what he or she deserves. Decision makers are then faced with the trade-off between giving some individuals more than they deserve, false positives, and giving some...

We report from a large-scale randomized field experiment conducted on a unique sample of more than 15 000 taxpayers in Norway, who were likely to have misreported their foreign income. We find that the inclusion of a moral appeal or a sentence that increases the perceived probability of...