This paper examines how perceived importance of family background affect distributional pref-erences using two large-scale survey experiments. In the first experiment, we randomly inform respondents about the relationship between parental income and economic success later in life, which renders...

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...

I provide axiomatic foundations for a model of taste uncertainty with endogenous learning through consumption. In this setting, uncertainty is over an unobservable, subjective state space. Preference over lottery–menu pairs is sufficient to identify the state space and the learning process. In...