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Self-interest and fairness: self-serving choices of justice principles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Ismael Rodriguez-Lara  and
Luis Moreno-Garrido
Ismael Rodriguez-Lara*
Affiliation:
Dpto. Analisis Economico, ERI-CES Universidad de Valencia, Campus Dels Tarongers, Avda. de los Naranjos s/n, 46011 Valencia, Spain
Luis Moreno-Garrido
Affiliation:
Dpto. Fundamentos del Analisis Economico, Universidad de Alicante, Carretera San Vicente s/n, San Vicente del Raspeig, 03690 Alicante, Spain
*
Ismael.Rodriguez@uv.es
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Abstract

We introduce non-enforceable property rights over a bargaining surplus in a dictator game with production, where the agent's effort is differentially rewarded and subsequently determines the size of the surplus. Using experimental data, we elicit individual preferences over the egalitarian, accountability and libertarian principles and provide evidence to support the inability of these justice principles to individually account for the observed behavior. We show that the justice principle that can be used to explain dictators’ choices depends on whether dictators are paid more or less than recipients for their effort. Our findings suggest that dictators do employ justice principles in self-serving ways and choose in each context the justice principle that maximizes their financial payoffs.

Keywords

Dictator gameJustice principlesSelf-interestSelf-serving bias

JEL classification

D63: Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement P14: Property Rights D64: Altruism • Philanthropy • Intergenerational Transfers C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D3: Distribution
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 158 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was circulated as working paper (WP-AD 2010-13) under the title “Self-interest and justice principles”.

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-011-9295-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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