IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/nhheco/2022_007.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Fairness and limited information: Are people Bayesian meritocrats?

Author

Listed:
  • Cappelen, Alexander

    (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)

  • Haan, Thomas de

    (University of Bergen)

  • Tungodden, Bertil

    (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration)

Abstract

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 information affects inequality acceptance. We connect the literatures on fairness and belief updating and show that irrationality in belief updating is potentially as important as differences in fairness views in explaining inequality acceptance. In many economic environments with limited information, signal-neglecting meritocrats act as egalitarians and base-rate neglecting meritocrats act as libertarians. The findings contribute to better understanding of the foundations of inequality acceptance in society.

Suggested Citation

  • Cappelen, Alexander & Haan, Thomas de & Tungodden, Bertil, 2022. "Fairness and limited information: Are people Bayesian meritocrats?," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 7/2022, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2022_007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Preuss, Marcel & Reyes, Germán & Somerville, Jason & Wu, Joy, 2022. "Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution," VfS Annual Conference 2022 (Basel): Big Data in Economics 264138, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    2. Marcel Preuss & Germán Reyes & Jason Somerville & Joy Wu, 2023. "Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution," CESifo Working Paper Series 10383, CESifo.
    3. Marcel Preuss & Germán Reyes & Jason Somerville & Joy Wu, 2023. "Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution," CEDLAS, Working Papers 0309, CEDLAS, Universidad Nacional de La Plata.
    4. Marcel Preuss & Germán Reyes & Jason Somerville & Joy Wu, 2024. "Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2024_491, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.
    5. Marcel Preuss & Germ'an Reyes & Jason Somerville & Joy Wu, 2022. "Inequality of Opportunity and Income Redistribution," Papers 2209.00534, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Fairness; Meritocracy;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2022_007. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Karen Reed-Larsen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sonhhno.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.