Many people judge that it is permissible to harm one person in order to save many in some circumstances but not in others: it matters how the harm comes about. Researchers have used trolley problems to investigate this phenomenon, eliciting moral judgments or behavioral predictions about...

In the last thirty years, economists and other social scientists have investigated people’s normative views on distributive justice. Here we study people’s normative views in social dilemmas, which underlie many situations of economic and social significance. Using insights from moral...

Since the recent financial crisis, regulators and the general public have focused on financial speculation as one of its potential causes. In addition to the roles played by rating agencies and complicated financial engineering, speculative short sales have been put into question. However,...

As societies are increasingly concerned with social risks, it is important to evaluate risks not only from an individual perspective, but also from a societal one. Many increases in social risk involve a simultaneous increase in risk and inequality. This paper presents an experiment which...

A recent experimental study by Falk and Szech (Science, 2013) concludes that „markets erode moral values”. If this were true, economists, who have emphasized the efficiency enhancing effects of markets for centuries, would have to reconsider their judgments fundamentally. This would be no...

Altruistic punishment is a fundamental driver for cooperation in human interactions. In this paper, we expand our understanding of this form of costly punishment to help explain a puzzle of voting behavior: why do people who are indifferent between two potential policy outcomes of an election...

Is competition perceived as a fair procedure? We report data from laboratory experiments where a powerful buyer can trade with one of several sellers. Sellers who feel shortchanged can engage in counterproductive behavior to punish the buyer. We find that the same unfavorable terms of trade...

This study evaluates people’s concerns for distributive fairness (equality of outcomes and payoffs to those worse-off) and reciprocal fairness (receiving what one is due based on one’s past actions) using dictator, ultimatum, and trust games. In the dictator games we classify individuals’...

This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of...

Redistribution is an inevitable feature of collective pension schemes. Nevertheless, it is still an open question what people’s preferences are regarding this form of redistribution. This paper reviews experimental evidence on preferences regarding redistribution and asks what this evidence...