Accountability and the fairness bias: the effects of effort vs. luck

According to the principle of accountability a person’s fair allocation takes into account the input-relevant variables she can influence, like effort, but not the variables she cannot influence, like luck. We study redistribution behavior in a real effort-task experiment, where luck influences production in three versions that differ in their effort-relatedness: luck comes either as wage luck, endowment luck or payment luck. We confirm that in a base treatment, i.e., in absence of luck, subjects base their allocation decisions largely on effort. When luck is present behavior changes. While we find that redistribution behavior of high performers in the real effort-task is affected by wage luck, we find that endowment luck affects mostly redistribution behavior of low performers. Furthermore, when introducing payment luck, i.e., redistribution of certain versus probabilistic payments, we find that allocations are more selfish for probabilistic payments. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013