We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. "Dictator games" with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and...

This article defines in a precise manner three different mechanisms to achieve impartiality in distributive justice and studies them experimentally. We consider a first-person procedure, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and two third-party procedures, the impartial spectator and the ideal...

This paper reports an experiment designed to elicit social preferences over income compensation schemes, where income differences between subjects have two independent components: one due to chosen effort and the other due to random chance. These differences can be compensated through social...

Which inequalities among individuals are considered unjust? This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to study distributive choices dealing with arbitrarily unequal initial endowments. In a three-person distribution problem where subjects either know or do not know their...

We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service "Google Answers". While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...

We explore experimentally how power asymmetries between partners affect relationship-specific investments. We find that on average players' investments are larger than equilibrium investments. In contrast to social dilemma experiments, in our experiment preferences for social welfare and those...

The literature on social preferences provides overwhelming evidence of departures from pure self-interest of individuals. Experiments show that people care about others' well-being and their relative standing. This paper investigates whether this type of behavior persists when risk comes into...

We study ultimatum and dictator experiments where the first mover chooses the amount of money to be distributed between the players within a given interval, knowing that her own share is fixed. Thus, the first mover is faced with scarcity, but not with the typical trade-off between her own and...

Talent allocation models assume that entrepreneurial talent is selfish and thus allocates into unproductive or even destructive activities if these offer the highest private returns. This paper experimentally analyzes other-regarding preferences of entrepreneurial talent. We find that making a...

This paper investigates whether language priming activates different cultural identities and norms associated with the language communicated; bilingual subjects are given Chinese instructions in the Chinese treatment and English instructions in the English treatment. The main findings are: (1) in...