My performance over yours: Earned entitlement, performance, luck, and deservingness in giving

We study how three widely discussed cues—source of income (merit vs luck), own performance, and information about others’ work status and performance—shape redistribution. Prior to the dictator game, all 306 dictators and most of the 306 recipients complete the same real-effort matrix task in an online experiment that would yield either $4 or $1 for the dictators. In the Performance treatment the dictator’s payoff is based on their performance; in Luck, it is assigned by a 50-50 draw. We find that: (i) Earned entitlement is prevalent for high-performing dictators: they keep more for themselves; (ii) Earned entitlement is conditional on performance or luck where high-performing dictators keep more when their high payoff is earned and give more when luck dictated the high payoff; (iii) Regarding recipients, deservingness arises from working and not performance. Dictators give around 20% more to anyone who worked, regardless of others’ performance. Taken together, the results show that dictators use own performance to justify keeping a larger share, yet apply a far coarser rule to others, i.e. they reward work and ignore relative performance. The findings refine the notion of earned entitlement and highlight asymmetric fairness criteria in redistributions.