Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status

Abigail Barr, Justine Burns (), Luis Miller and Ingrid Shaw ()
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Justine Burns: SALDRU, School of Economics, University of Cape Town

No 66, SALDRU Working Papers from Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town

Abstract: We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial endowments were earned, under the other they were randomly assigned. The first experiment was conducted in Oxford, United Kingdom, the second in Cape Town, South Africa. In both locations we found that relatively well-off individuals make allocations to others that reflect those others’ initial endowments more when those endowments were earned rather than random; among relatively poor individuals this was not the case.

Keywords: Distributive Justice; Inequality; Laboratory Experiments. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C93 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2011-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-cbe and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status (2011)
Working Paper: Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status (2011)
Working Paper: Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ldr:wpaper:66

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