Examining Theories of Distributive Justice with an Asymmetric Public Goods Game

Stephen Schmidt

The Journal of Economic Education, 2015, vol. 46, issue 3, 260-273

Abstract: In this article, the author presents an asymmetric version of the familiar public goods classroom experiment, in which some players are given more tokens to invest than others, and players collectively decide whether to divide the return to the group investment asymmetrically as well. The asymmetry between players raises normative issues about fairness, rights, and equality that are not present in the symmetric game, where efficiency is the major relevant normative concept. Playing the game in class requires students to confront the distributional question and shows how issues of efficiency can become entangled with other moral issues when solving economic policy problems. The game allows instructors to incorporate theories of distributive justice into economic reasoning in the classroom, as has been widely suggested recently.

Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00220485.2015.1040181 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:jeduce:v:46:y:2015:i:3:p:260-273

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/VECE20

DOI: 10.1080/00220485.2015.1040181

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Economic Education is currently edited by William Walstad

More articles in The Journal of Economic Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().