Meritocratic beliefs are often invoked as justification of inequality. We provide evidence on how meritocratic beliefs are shaped by economic status and how they contribute to the moral justification of inequality. In a large-scale survey experiment in the US, we show that success causes a...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

We study beliefs and choices in a repeated normal-form game. In addition to a baseline treatment with common knowledge of the game structure, feedback about choices in the previous period and random matching, we run treatments (i) with fixed matching, (ii) without information about the...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

This paper studies the effect of introducing costly partner selection for the voluntary contribution to a public good. Subjects participate in six sequences of five rounds of a two-person public good game in partner design. At the end of each sequence subjects can select a new partner out of six...

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...

Efficient diffusion of economic information plays a critical role in the functioning of society, and, more specifically, households. We study information diffusion between spouses in a representative sample of the German population. We focus on an important economic belief: the household’s...

Although there is abundant evidence on individual preferences for policies that reduce national inequality, there is very little evidence on preferences for policies addressing global inequality. To investigate the latter, we conducted a two-year, face-to-face survey experiment on a...