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...

Meritocracies aspire to reward effort and hard work but promise not to judge individuals by the circumstances they were born into. The choice to work hard is, however, often shaped by circumstances. This study investigates whether people's merit judgments are sensitive to this endogeneity of...

A defining feature of meritocratic societies is that resource distributions reflect individual effort levels. However, this introduces a dilemma in a world where parents care for their children. If one pair of parents works harder than a second pair of parents, the first pair has merited the...

Frequently, one person's success comes at the expense of others. We contrast such zero-sum environments in which individuals' payoffs are interdependent to those where payoffs are independent. In a laboratory experiment, we study whether the resulting inequality is perceived differently and how...