The role of justice in interdependent decision making

Abstract

A motivational analysis of decision making in which payoffs are interdependent suggests that choices can be regarded as means of allocating rewards in accordance with certain ethical principles, which may not correspond to “rational” decision criteria of the sort proposed by statistical decision and game theorists—e.g., mazimizing expected utility. Specifically, individuals a and b appear to make maximizing choices with the frequency that is required to maintain or achieve justice in the distribution of rewards—a condition quantitatively defined as equality of the ratios of their perceived relative merit ( X) to the amount of reward ( R) felt to be deserved. Thus, X a R a = X b R b . Experiments designed to test hypotheses derived from this “exchange” theory of choice behavior yielded entirely affirmative results.