Fairness Across the World: Preferences and Beliefs

The paper reports from a large-scale study of people’s fairness preferences and beliefs, where 65 000 individuals from 60 countries make real distributive choices. We establish causal evidence on the role of the source of inequality and efficiency considerations for inequality acceptance, and we provide a rich description of people’s beliefs about the main sources of inequality and the cost of redistribution.

We find large heterogeneities in both preferences and beliefs and show that they are strongly associated with people’s policy views on redistribution. The paper also studies how people’s fairness views relate to various country characteristics. In particular, we show that there are striking differences between the developed and developing countries in both fairness preferences and beliefs.

This session will be chaired by Postdoctoral fellow Catalina Buitrago, NHH.

Bertil Tungodden is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at NHH Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. He is Scientific Director of the Centre of Excellence, FAIR—Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality and Rationality, and co-director of the research group The Choice Lab. He is an Einstein Visiting Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and affiliated researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute in Bergen, Norway.

His research interests are experimental and behavioral economics, development economics, distributive justice and social choice theory. Tungodden has published extensively in leading international academic journals in economics and philosophy, including Science, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Philosophy. He is presently an associate editor in Journal of Political Economy and Social Choice and Welfare, and has previously held editorial positions in Management Science, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization and Economics and Philosophy.