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...

Can inequality in rewards result in an erosion in broad-based support for meritocratic norms? We hypothesize that unequal rewards between the successful and the rest, drives a cognitive gap in their meritocratic beliefs, and hence their social preferences for redistribution. Two separate...

Three determining factors for economic inequality are self-chosen effort, self-chosen risk, and external circumstances. The fairness people assign to inequalities due to effort and external circumstances is widely studied. Insights on the fairness of inequalities due to self-chosen effort and...

A meritocratic fairness ideal is generally believed to regard income inequality as fair if it stems from performance differentials rather than luck. In this study, we present experimental evidence showing that merit judgments are shaped by the source of performance differentials while holding...

Support for redistribution depends on whether inequality stems from differences in performance or luck, but different sources of luck may impact redistribution differentially. We elicit redistribution decisions from a U.S.-representative sample who observe worker earnings and whether luck...

An influential subset of the literature on distributional preferences studies how preferences condition on information about workers’ characteristics, such as their relative productivity. In this study we confirm that there are default effects when such conditional fair-ness preferences are...

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...