Delineation of someone's ownership typically involves the sense of deservedness: the property right is respected as long as the owner deserve to own the object. Objectively, deservedness is often linked to one's actions or specific attributes that justify the owner's claims. We argue that people...

We implement the Rawlsian veil of ignorance in the laboratory. Our experimental design allows separating the effects of risk and social preferences behind the veil of ignorance. Subjects prefer more equal distributions behind than in front of the veil of ignorance, but only a minority acts...

We implement the Rawlsian thought experiment of a veil of ignorance in the laboratory which introduces risk and possibly social preferences. We find that both men and women react to the risk introduced by the veil of ignorance. Only the women additionally exhibit social preferences that reflect...

Experimental literature on pro-social behavior has been largely focused on settings where the decision of donors is sufficient for an interaction to occur. However, in many real-life applications recipients first have to ask donors for help to initiate the transaction. We suggest that this first...

For decades, experimental economics has been very interested in behavior that could be characterized as practicing solidarity (although the term is rarely used). Solidarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching. This paper builds a bridge between these two endeavors that, thus far, had...

In Becker et al. (2013a,b), we proposed a theory to explain giving behaviour in dictator experiments by a combination of selfishness and a notion of justice. The theory was tested using dictator, social planner, and veil of ignorance experiments. Here we analyse gender differences in preferences...

Engelmann and Strobel (AER 2004) question the relevance of inequity aversion in simple dictator game experiments claiming that a combination of a preference for efficiency and a Rawlsian motive for helping the least well-off is more important than inequity aversion. We show that these results...

In Becker et al. (2013a,b), we proposed a theory to explain giving behaviour in dictator experiments by a combination of selfishness and a notion of justice. The theory was tested using dictator, social planner, and veil of ignorance experiments. Here we analyse gender differences in preferences...

Social preferences have been shown to be an important determinant of economic decision making for many adults. We present a large-scale experiment with 883 children and adolescents, aged eight to seventeen years. Participants make decisions in eight simple, one-shot allocation tasks, allowing us...