ÒTHE PLURALISM OF FAIRNESS IDEALSÓ: A COMMENT

Anna Conte () and Peter Moffatt ()
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Peter Moffatt: School of Economics, University of East Anglia

Quaderni DPTEA from Department of Economic and Business Sciences, LUISS Guido Carli

Abstract: A recent paper by Cappelen et al. (2007) reports on the estimation of a finite mixture model of fairness using experimental data. Their estimation approach is based on a choice model. However, we argue strongly that since the data is not choice data, it should not be modelled as such. We adopt a different approach: modelling the decision variable directly, while incorporating the upper censoring, which is prominent in the data. We reach different conclusions from Cappelen et al. (2007): although we agree that ÒStrict EgalitariansÓ are the dominant type, we find that ÒLibertariansÓ barely exist. Our overall conclusion is that the practice of treating continuous data, or interval data, as if it were choice data is not innocuous, since it can lead to very different predictions. This conclusion is likely to be relevant to other contexts in which the decision variable is quantitative.

Date: 2009-01
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