The Merit Primacy Effect

Alexander Cappelen, Karl Ove Moene, Siv-Elisabeth Skjelbred () and Bertil Tungodden
Additional contact information
Siv-Elisabeth Skjelbred: University of Oslo

No 2017-047, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Do people give primacy to merit when luck partly determines earnings? This paper reports from a novel experiment where third-party spectators have to decide whether to redistribute from a high-earner to a low-earner in cases where earnings are determined by luck and merit. Our main finding is that the spectators assign strong primacy to merit in such situations, and as a result violate basic fairness conditions. We believe that the results shed new light on inequality acceptance in society, in particular by showing how just a little bit of merit can make people significantly more inequality accepting.

Keywords: luck; experimental economics; Inequality; fairness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hpe
Note: MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Cappel ... t-primacy-effect.pdf First version, April 25, 2017 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Merit Primacy Effect (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2017-047

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().