Distributive justice: Theoretical foundations and empirical findings

Abstract

The first part of this paper discusses various theories of distributive justice such as utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, approaches within cooperative bargaining theory, and the notion of fair allocations. The focus is on the different informational bases used in these solution concepts. The second part reports some results from empirical investigations where a particular distributive problem had to be solved by undergraduate students of economics and business administration. The question we are posing is whether the respondents' behaviour can, to some extent at least, be rationalized in terms of utilitarian ethics.