• Fairness and limited information: Are people Bayesian meritocrats? 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Haan, Thomas de; Tungodden, Bertil (SAM DP;07/2022, Working paper, 2022-05)
      Meritocracy is a prominent fairness view in many societies, but often difficult to apply because there is limited information about the source of inequality. This paper studies theoretically and empirically how limited ...
    • Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance 

      Almås, Ingvild; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper;18/15, Working paper, 2015-08)
      Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people’s fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for ...
    • Fairness and Willingness to Compete 

      Buser, Thomas; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Tungodden, Bertil (DP SAM;08/2021, Working paper, 2021-03)
      The large experimental literature on competitiveness has typically ignored a key feature of many competitive settings in society: competition is not always fair. The playing field may be uneven and competitors of unequal ...
    • Fairness in bankruptcy situations: an experimental study 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Luttens, Roland I.; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper;17/15, Working paper, 2015-08)
      The pari passu principle is the most prominent principle in the law of insolvency. We report from a lab experiment designed to study whether people find this principle a fair solution to the bankruptcy problem. The ...
    • Fairness in Winner-Take-All Markets 

      Bartling, Björn; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Ekström, Mathias; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (DP SAM;8/2018, Working paper, 2018-04)
      The paper reports the first experimental study on people’s fairness views on extreme income inequalities arising from winner-take-all reward structures. We find that the majority of participants consider extreme income ...
    • Fairness is intuitive 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Nielsen, Ulrik H.; Tungodden, Bertil; Tyran, Jean-Robert; Wengström, Erik (Discussion paper;9/2014, Working paper, 2014-04)
      In this paper we provide new evidence showing that fair behavior is intuitive to most people. We find a strong association between a short response time and fair behavior in the dictator game. This association is robust ...
    • Fiscal corruption : a vice or a virtue? 

      Fjeldstad, Odd-Helge; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 2002-07)
      Recent literature on tax administration in poor countries suggests there are virtues of allowing fiscal corruption. By strengthening the bargaining power of corrupt tax officers, it is argued that tax evasion may be ...
    • Free to Fail? Paternalistic Preferences in the United States 

      Bartling, Björn; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Hermes, Henning; Skivenes, Marit; Tungodden, Bertil (SAM DP;09/2023, Working paper, 2023-05-16)
      We study paternalistic preferences in two large-scale experiments with participants from the general population in the United States. Spectators decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, who is mistaken about ...
    • Give and take in dictator games 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Nielsen, Ulrik H.; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil; Tyran, Jean-Robert (Discussion paper;14/2012, Working paper, 2012-07)
      It has been shown that participants in the dictator game are less willing to give money to the other participant when their choice set also includes the option to take money. We examine whether this effect is due to the ...
    • Heterogeneity in fairness views - a challenge to the mutualistic approach? 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper;7/2012, Working paper, 2012-03)
      This commentary argues that the observed heterogeneity in fairness views, documented in many economic experiments, poses a challenge to the partner choice theory developed by Baumard, André and Sperber. It also discusses ...
    • How Are Gender Norms Perceived? 

      Bursztyn, Leonardo; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Tungodden, Bertil; Voena, Alessandra; Yanagizawa-Drott, David (SAM DP;05/2023, Working paper, 2023-03-22)
      Actual and perceived gender norms are key to understanding gender inequality. Using newly-collected, nationally representative datasets from 60 countries covering 80% of the world population, this paper studies gender norms ...
    • How middle-men can undermine anti-corruption reforms 

      Bjorvatn, Kjetil; Torsvik, Gaute; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 2004-12)
      The anti-corruption reform in the Tanzanian tax bureaucracy in the mid-1990s was apparently a short-lived success. In the wake of the reform, a number of “tax experts” established themselves in the market, many of them ...
    • How Strong are Ethnic Preferences? 

      Berge, Lars Ivar Oppedal; Bjorvatn, Kjetil; Galle, Simon; Miguel, Edward; Posner, Daniel; Tungodden, Bertil; Zhang, Kelly (SAM;26/2015, Working paper, 2015-11-13)
      Ethnic divisions have been shown to adversely affect economic performance and political stability, especially in Africa, but the underlying reasons remain contested, with multiple mechanisms potentially playing a role. We ...
    • Human and financial capital for microenterprise development : evidence from a field and lab experiment 

      Berge, Lars Ivar Oppedal; Bjorvatn, Kjetil; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 2011-01)
    • Immoral criminals? An experimental study of social preferences among prisoners 

      Birkeland, Sigbjørn; Cappelen, Alexander W.; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion Papers;15/2011, Working paper, 2011-09)
      This paper studies the pro-social preferences of criminals by comparing the behavior of a group of prisoners in a lab experiment with the behavior of a benchmark group recruited from the general population. We find ...
    • The importance of moral reflection and self-reported data in a dictator game with production 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Hole, Astri Drange; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 2007-12)
      This paper studies how individual behavior is affected by moral reflection in a dictator game with production, and the informational value of self-reported data on fairness. We find that making individuals reflect on ...
    • The indexing impasse : is "the intersection approach" a solution? 

      Brun, Bernt Christian; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 1998-11)
      Rawls (1971,1993) suggests that interpersonal comparisons of well-being should be based on a primary goods index, but it is well-known that in general this approach is not compatible with the Pareto principle. This is ...
    • Is there a development gap in rationality? 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Kariv, Shachar; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper;8/2014, Working paper, 2014-03)
      We report an experimental test of the four touchstones of rationality in choice under risk – utility maximization, stochastic dominance, expected-utility maximization and small-stakes risk neutrality – with students from ...
    • Just luck: an experimental study of risk taking and fairness 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Konow, James; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion paper, Working paper, 2010-01)
      Choices involving risk significantly affect the distribution of income and wealth in society, but there is probably no more contentious question of justice than how to allocate the gains and losses that inevitably result ...
    • Leadership and incentives 

      Cappelen, Alexander W.; Reme, Bjørn-Atle; Sørensen, Erik Ø.; Tungodden, Bertil (Discussion Papers;2/2014, Working paper, 2014-01)
      We study how leader compensation affects public goods provision. We report from a lab experiment with four treatments, where the base treatment was a standard public goods game with simultaneous contribution decisions, ...