期刊名称：Discussion Papers / Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration
印刷版ISSN：0804-6824
出版年度：2015
卷号：2015
出版社：Bergen
摘要：Fairness preferences fundamentally affect individual behavior and play animportant role in shaping social and political institutions. However, people differboth with respect to what they view as fair and with respect to how muchweight they attach to fairness considerations. In this paper, we study the role offamily background in explaining these heterogeneities in fairness preferences. Inparticular, we examine how socioeconomic background relates to fairness viewsand to how people make trade-offs between fairness and self-interest. To studythis we conducted an economic experiment with a representative sample of 14-15year-olds and matched the experimental data to administrative data on parentalincome and education. The participants made two distributive choices in theexperiment. The first choice was to distribute money between themselves andanother participant in a situation where there was no difference in merit. Thesecond choice was to distribute money between two other participants with unequalmerits. Our main finding is that there is a systematic difference in fairnessview between children from low socioceconomic status (SES) families and therest of the participants; more than 50 percent of the participants from low SESfamilies are egalitarians, whereas only about 20 percent in the rest of the samplehold this fairness view. In contrast, we find no significant difference in the weightattached to fairness between children from different socioeconomic groups
