This paper explores the efficiency properties of a voluntary auction under which the city submitting the low bid hosts the region′s noxious facility and receives the high bid as compensation. In the Nash equilibrium of the auction game, the auction mechanism is individually rational (participation is rational for all values of the local environmental costs of the facility), incentive-compatible (the facility is located in the...
In almost all democratic national elections an individual vote cannot change the election outcome. The fact that many individuals nevertheless participate voluntarily in such elections suggests that people do care about democracy as such. This experiment investigates the value of democratic voting rights by providing participants the chance to sell them. More specifically, an incentive compatible mechanism is used to elicit the willingness-to-accept value of...
Two studies examined how litigants' evaluations of the outcome and process of lawsuits affected their judgments about the fairness of procedures and their acceptance of awards from court-ordered arbitration. The studies tested predictions concerning the operation of a "fairness heuristic"-that procedural justice judgments mediate the effects of process impressions and outcome evaluations on the decision to accept or reject the directives of an authority. Participants...
The present article chronicles the history of the field of organizational justice, identifies current themes, and recommends new directions for the future. A historical overview of the field focuses on research and theory in the distributive justice tradition (e.g., equity theory) as well as the burgeoning topic of procedural justice. This forms the foundation for the discussion offive popular themes in contemporary organizational justice research:...
The correlates of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice were examined using 190 studies samples, totaling 64,757 participants. We found the distinction between the three justice types to be merited. While organizational practices and outcomes were related to the three justice types, demographic characteristics of the perceiver were, in large part, unrelated to perceived justice. Job performance and counterproductive work behaviors, considered to be outcomes of...
We study the effect of the level of inequality in society on individual well-being using a total of 123,668 answers to a survey question about “happiness”. We find that individuals have a lower tendency to report themselves happy when inequality is high, even after controlling for individual income, a large set of personal characteristics, and year and country (or, in the case of the US,...
People who believe that their society has few impediments to upward mobility tend to oppose governmental redistribution. This is true even among the poor. Is this because people with this belief expect to be well off in the future, and hence oppose redistribution on self-interested gounds? Or is it because they believe that the less well off have not made the effort to move up,...
This paper evaluates numerous positive and normative theories of justice in positive terms, i.e., in terms of how accurately they describe the impartial fairness preferences of real people. In addition, the paper proposes and defends an integrated justice theory based on preferences over four distinct and sometimes conflicting forces. These forces frame the analysis of the individual theories and inspire four corresponding theoretical classes: equality...