Meritocratic fairness justifies inequality when it stems from performance. Yet performance is influenced by one's genetics. I investigate whether individuals' redistribution preferences are affected by their beliefs about genetics' role in generating performance inequality. In an incentivized...

We show that peer sanctioning increases cooperation in public goods experiments more in unequally endowed groups than in equally endowed groups. Punishment results in a redistribution of wealth from high to low endowment players within groups. <p>

This paper presents an experiment investigating what cultural and institutional factors underlying a society might render its members more or less tolerant of inequality in favor of greater efficiency. The specific institutional factors we address concern the fairness in the procedures or...

We develop a social choice experiment to estimate public preferences on population ethics. Our experiment poses three within-subject treatments in which participants allocate scarce resources to determine the health-related quality-of-life, and existence, of two population groups. Within a...

The introduction of inequity concerns into the Trust Game gives rise to complementary concepts of conditional trustworthiness and unconditional untrustworthiness. When the inequity concern is not accounted for, unconditional untrustworthiness is overestimated. The high proportion of trustees...

We explore the effect of income inequality and peer punishment on voluntary provision of public goods in an experimental context. Our sample draws from nine fishing communities in South-Africa where high levels of inequality prevail. We find that aggregate cooperation is higher in both the...

Receiving equal wages for work of equal value is a legal right in many countries. However, it remains unknown to what degree the neglect of this principle yields differences in pay between social and other occupations. The results of a task-based analysis with survey data confirm a notable wage...

We develop a social choice experiment to estimate public preferences on population ethics. Our experiment poses three within-subject treatments in which participants allocate scarce resources to determine the health-related quality-of-life, and existence, of two population groups. Within a...

Meritocratic fairness justifies inequality when it stems from performance. Yet performance is influenced by one's genetics. I investigate whether individuals' redistribution preferences are affected by their beliefs about genetics' role in generating performance inequality. In an incentivized...

In a novel experimental design, we study how social immobility affects the choice among distributional schemes in an experimental democracy. We design a two-period experiment in which subjects first choose a distributional scheme by majority voting (“social contract”). Then subjects engage...