Some people have a concern for a fair distribution of incomes while others do not. Does such a concern matter for majority voting on redistribution? Fairness preferences are relevant for redistribution outcomes only if fair-minded voters are pivotal. Pivotality, in turn, depends on the structure...

In this contribution we study the determinants of how individuals assess the social fairness of a given income distribution. We propose an analytical framework distinguishing between potential impact factors related to the following fields: first fairness preferences, second beliefs on the...

This contribution empirically analyses the individual determinants of tax rate preferences. For that purpose we make use of the representative German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) that offers data on the individual attitudes toward progressive, proportional, and regressive taxation. Our...

Economists praise the efficiency of the price mechanism in allocating scarce resources. Others, however, often reject it as unfair. In this study, we investigate the extent to which economists also differ from non-economists in how they value the fairness of the price system, and examine how...

In diesem Beitrag geht es um subjektive Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen, nicht Gerechtigkeit an sich, da erstere im Gegensatz zu letzterer empirisch feststellbar und handlungswirksam sind. Allerdings müssen ihre Folgen nicht nur gute sein. Gerechtigkeitsvorstellungen können erstens die...

Zwei wesentliche Perspektiven, Arbeitslosigkeit zu untersuchen, sind die der Gerechtigkeit und die der Effizienz. Unverschuldete Arbeitslosigkeit wird als ungerecht empfunden. Zugleich wird häufig argumentiert, dass Arbeitslosigkeit zu gesellschaftlichen Wohlfahrtseinbußen führt, da Arbeit...

In recent years a large number of experimental studies have documented the existence of strong reciprocity among humans. Strong reciprocity means that people willingly repay gifts and punish the violation of cooperation and fairness norms even in anonymous one-shot encounters with genetically...

In this paper, we examine students' attitudes towards various allocation mechanisms for a scarce resource. For this purpose, we have run a survey among officers of the German military who are enrolled in different courses of study (such as economics) at the University of the German Federal Armed...

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

We use a two-person public goods experiment to distinguish between effciency and fairness as possible motivations for cooperative behavior. Asymmetric marginal per capita returns allow only the high-productivity player to increase group payoffs when contributing positive amounts. Asymmetric...