Fairness in markets and market experiments

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price when higher wages are paid to the worker in a laboratory experiment framed as a market exchange correlates both with the choice for a fair trade product before the laboratory experiment and with the willingness to pay a positive fair trade premium, elicited at the end of the experiment. These results support the notion that fairness preferences as assessed in laboratory experiments capture preferences in comparable situations outside the laboratory.