Drawing on the theoretical and experimental literature on distributive justice, we put some assumptions of the contractarian argument to an empirical test by means of an experiment which investigates the influence that explicit agreement under the veil of ignorance may have on individuals’...

We devise a randomized experiment using task performance in which players (acting as spectators/stakeholders) directly decide on allocation criteria under ignorance or knowledge of the payoff distributions. Our main result is a strong and significant gender effect: women choose significantly...