Fairness in winner-take-all competitions

Björn Bartling, Alexander Cappelen, Mathias Ekström, Erik Sørensen and Bertil Tungodden

No 287, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a large-scale incentivized experiment investigating individuals’ fairness perceptions of the extreme income inequalities generated in winner-take-all competitions. We find that extreme income inequality in winner-take-all competitions is commonly accepted in our sample of 4,000 participants from the general population of the U.S., even when the winner outperforms the runner-up by the smallest possible margin. Generally, fairness judgements are only weakly influenced by the winning margin, which reveals that the mere fact of winning — be it by a tiny margin or by a substantial gap — justifies resulting inequalities. Our results improve understanding of public attitudes toward fairness and redistributive policies in winner-take-all competitions marked by extreme income inequalities.

Keywords: Winner-take-all competitions; winning margin; merit; fairness; income inequality; redistributive policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-05, Revised 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:287

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