A Meritocratic Origin of Egalitarian Behavior

Alexander Cappelen, Johanna Mollerstrom, Bjørn-Atle Reme and Bertil Tungodden

No 9/2019, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: The meritocratic fairness ideal implies that inequalities in earnings are regarded as fair only when they reflect differences in performance. Consequently, implementation of the meritocratic fairness ideal requires complete information about individual performances, but in practice, such information is often not available. We study redistributive behavior in the common, but previously understudied, situation where there is uncertainty about whether inequality is reflecting performance or luck. We show theoretically that meritocrats in such situations can become very egalitarian in their behavior, and that the degree to which this happens depends on how they trade off the probability of making mistakes and the size of mistakes that they risk making when redistributing under uncertainty. Our laboratory experiments show, in line with our model, that uncertainty about the source of inequality provides a strong egalitarian pull on the behavior of meritocrats. In addition, the external validity of our framework, and the results from the laboratory, are supported in two general population surveys conducted in the United States and Norway.

Keywords: inequality; fairness; redistribution; responsibility; performance; luck; experiment; survey. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D63 D81 H23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2019-04-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-ore
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://openaccess.nhh.no/nhh-xmlui/bitstream/item/201528/DP%2009.pdf?sequence=1 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: A Meritocratic Origin of Egalitarian Behaviour (2022)
Working Paper: A Meritocratic Origin of Egalitarian Behavior (2019)
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:hhs:nhheco:2019_009

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics NHH, Department of Economics, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Synne Stormoen ().