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...

The ‘boy crisis' prompts the question of whether people interpret inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale distributive experiment involving more than 5,000 Americans. Our data provide strong evidence of a...

It has been shown that participants in the dictator game are less willing to give money to the other participant when their choice set also includes the option to take money. We examine whether this effect is due to the choice set providing a signal about entitlements in a setting where...

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...

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 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...