Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial endowments were earned, under the other they were randomly assigned. The first experiment was conducted in Oxford, United Kingdom, the second in Cape Town, South Africa. In both locations we found that relatively well-off individuals make allocations to others that reflect those others’ initial endowments more when those endowments were earned rather than random; among relatively poor individuals this was not the case.Distributive Justice, Inequality, Laboratory Experiments

Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial endowments were earned, under the other they were randomly assigned. The first experiment was conducted in Oxford, United Kingdom, the second in Cape Town, South Africa. In both locations we found that relatively well-off individuals make allocations to others that reflect those others’ initial endowments more when those endowments were earned rather than random; among relatively poor individuals this was not the case.Distributive Justice, Inequality, Laboratory Experiments.

Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status

Issues of inequality, distribution and redistribution are commanding progressively more attention in the minds of not only world leaders, politicians, and academics but also of ordinary people. So, what constitutes distributive justice in the minds of ordinary people? The philosophical literature offers several alternative principles of distributive justice. But which of these, if any, do ordinary people adopt as the principle against which to judge their own and other people's and entities' outcomes and actions? This paper presents the findings from two experiments designed to test the hypothesis that individuals' notions of distributive justice are associated with their economic status relative to others within their own society. In the experiments, each participant played a specially designed distribution game. This game allowed us to establish whether and to what extent the participants perceived inequalities owing to differences in productivity rather than luck as just and, hence, not in need of redress. A type of participant that distinguished between inequalities owing to productivity and luck, redressing the latter and not or to a lesser extent the former, is said to be subject to an earned endowment effect. Drawing on previous work in both economics and psychology, we hypothesised that the richer members of any society would be more likely to be subject to an earned endowment effect, while the poorer members would be more inclined towards redistribution irrespective of whether the inequality was owing to productivity or luck. We conducted our first experiment in the UK. We selected unemployed residents of one city to represent low economic status individuals and student and employed residents of the same city to represent relatively high economic status individuals. We found a statistically significant earned endowment effect among the students and employed and no effect among the unemployed. The difference between the unemployed and the others was also statistically significant. Our second experiment was designed to test the generalizability of the findings from our first. It was conducted in Cape Town, South Africa. Exploiting the fact that Cape Town is home to one of the continent's best universities, we built a participant sample that was highly comparable to the UK sample in many regards. However, the states of employment and unemployment are less distinct in South Africa as compared to the UK and a number of interventions are in place to ensure that the student body of the University of Cape Town includes young people from not only rich and middle income but also poorer households. So, in South Africa we chose to rely on responses to a survey question to distinguish between high and low economic status individuals. The findings from this second experiment also supported the hypothesis; among individuals who classified their households as rich or high or middle income there was a statistically significant earned endowment effect, among individuals who classified their households as poor or low income there was not and the different between the two participant types was significant. We conclude that individuals' notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative economic status within society and that this is a generalizable result.Distributive Justice; inequality; laboratory experiments.

Individual notions of distributive justice and relative economic status

We present two experiments designed to investigate whether individuals’ notions of distributive justice are associated with their relative (within-society) economic status. Each participant played a specially designed four-person dictator game under one of two treatments, under one initial endowments were earned, under the other they were randomly assigned. The first experiment was conducted in Oxford, United Kingdom, the second in Cape Town, South Africa. In both locations we found that relatively well-off individuals make allocations to others that reflect those others’ initial endowments more when those endowments were earned rather than random; among relatively poor individuals this was not the case.distributive justice, inequality, laboratory experiments

Moral consequences of becoming unemployed

We test the conjecture that becoming unemployed erodes the extent to which a person acknowledges earned entitlement. We use behavioral experiments to generate incentive compatible measures of individuals’ tendencies to acknowledge earned entitlement and incorporate these experiments in a two-stage study. In the first stage, participants’ acknowledgement of earned entitlement was measured by engaging them in the behavioral experiments and their individual employment status and other relevant socio-economic characteristics were recorded. In the second stage, a year later, the process was repeated using the same instruments. The combination of the experimentally generated data and the longitudinal design allows us to investigate our conjecture using a difference-in-difference approach, while ruling out the pure self-interest confound. We report evidence consistent with a large, negative effect of becoming unemployed on the acknowledgement of earned entitlement

Global Administrative Law: The View from Basel

International law-making by sub-national actors and regulatory networks of bureaucrats has come under attack as lacking in accountability and legitimacy. Global administrative law is emerging as an approach to understanding what international organizations and national governments do, or ought to do, to respond to the perceived democracy deficit in international law-making. This article examines the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a club of central bankers who meet to develop international banking capital standards and to develop supervisory guidance. The Basel Committee embodies many of the attributes that critics of international law-making lament. A closer examination, however, reveals a structure of global administrative law inherent in the Basel process that could be a model for international law-making with greater accountability and legitimacy

Hugh A. Barr to H. R. Miller (5 November)

News concerning Miller\u27s electionhttps://egrove.olemiss.edu/ciwar_corresp/1605/thumbnail.jp

J. Barr to H. R. Miller (22 January 1861)

Concerning various cases and debtshttps://egrove.olemiss.edu/ciwar_corresp/1610/thumbnail.jp

Korea and the global software industry

노트 : Final Report to the Korea IT Industry Promotion Agenc

Constrained invariant mass distributions in cascade decays. The shape of the "mqllm_{qll}-threshold" and similar distributions

Considering the cascade decay $D\to c C \to c b B \to c b a A$ in which $D,C,B,A$ are massive particles and $c,b,a$ are massless particles, we determine for the first time the shape of the distribution of the invariant mass of the three massless particles $m_{abc}$ for the sub-set of decays in which the invariant mass $m_{ab}$ of the last two particles in the chain is (optionally) constrained to lie inside an arbitrary interval, $m_{ab} \in [ m_{ab}^\text{cut min}, m_{ab}^\text{cut max}]$. An example of an experimentally important distribution of this kind is the ``$m_{qll}$ threshold'' -- which is the distribution of the combined invariant mass of the visible standard model particles radiated from the hypothesised decay of a squark to the lightest neutralino via successive two body decay,: \squark \to q \ntlinoTwo \to q l \slepton \to q l l \ntlinoOne , in which the experimenter requires additionally that $m_{ll}$ be greater than ${m_{ll}^{max}}/\sqrt{2}$. The location of the ``foot'' of this distribution is often used to constrain sparticle mass scales. The new results presented here permit the location of this foot to be better understood as the shape of the distribution is derived. The effects of varying the position of the $m_{ll}$ cut(s) may now be seen more easily.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure