Unequal Incentives and Perceived Fairness in Groups

In many groups heterogeneous incentives induce people to make unequal contributions to a common pool. This paper studies whether people consider the random assignment of such unequal incentives as unequal opportunities and demand more egalitarian distributions of the pool. The aggregate experimental results show that low contributors do not make such consideration if their incentive scheme provided opportunities for private gains in case of low contributions. When incentives induce lower contributions in order to avoid private losses, some people increase their claim but these increases are lower than in the case of unequal opportunities. Meanwhile high contributors reward low contributors if they do not follow incentives.