AEA RC T Registr y

The American Economic Association's registry for randomized controlled trials

Is people's willingness to implement their fairness views on a group dependent on how many in the group share their view?
We designed a new experiment to answer this question. In this experiment, spectator participants are incentivized to report how many workers hold which views of whether or not it is fair to redistribute income in a work task. Participants are elicited by placing a lever indicating the portion of people finding each redistribution option fair and paid according to the accuracy of their estimate. They are then elicited for their willingness to pay to implement the distribution they found fair, upon a pair of worker participants who had completed the work task using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) method. After their willingness to pay was elicited participants where asked which redistribution they themselves found fair. The experiment is planned to be conducted at Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform with participants from the United States of America. We hypothesize that this study will replicate the result from our previous study where we found that although spectator participants systematically overestimate how many shares their fairness view, being informed about the true number does not affect their decision to implement the distribution they found fair. The new experiment design includes changes to address whether preferences for consistency contaminated our original result in addition to other changes addressing incentivizing choices and clarifying the connection between fairness views and the worker section.