Fairness Ideals, Hidden Selfishness, and Opportunistic Behavior: An Experimental Approach

Abstract

Economic experiments have shown that human incentives are not limited to the profit-maximizing principle but also motivated by fairness. Such studies presuppose that individuals commit to fixed value systems and that experimental institutions invoke fairness ideals. By performing a distributive experiment followed by production, this research shows that participants strategically select fairness ideals that are advantageous to themselves in terms of self-distribution. Participants whose relative earnings exceed those of their partners in their assigned experimental pairs adhere to a liberalist fairness ideal, whereas those whose relative earnings are lower than their partners prefer an egalitarian distribution of money. This reflects that individuals behave opportunistically as a result of resolving a cognitive dissonance between material utility and fairness.