Experimental Investigations on Fairness and Social Norms in Allocation Settings

The research agenda that guides this dissertation is characterized by the three aspects specified in the title. First, all of the projects are experimental investigations. That is, I apply the method of incentivized economic experiments in order to answer research questions through the generation of behavioral data in the "laboratory". Second, all of the experiments involve the elicitation of fairness perceptions or perceptions of social norms. Third, the experimental paradigms used in the projects represent allocation settings, where some active individuals decide about how resources are allocated, while some passive subjects depend on these decisions. Finally, the majority of the projects is connected through a methodological aspect, since most of the experiments contain coordination games, through which I try to draw inferences about the subjects´ traits on the individual level. The combined data of the projects indicate large potential to apply coordination games as an incentivized crowd wisdom device and to use coordination choices on the individual level as a tractable tool to extract private information

Favoritism and Fairness in Teams

We experimentally study how people resolve a tension between favoritism and fairness when allocating a profit in a team production setting. Past research shows that people tend to favor their ingroup at the cost of an outgroup when allocating a given amount of money. However, when the money to be allocated depends on joint production, we find that most players allocate proportionally according to others’ relative contributions, irrespective of their social identity affiliations. We discuss the implications of our findings on how distributive norms could shape team cooperation