Fairness and self-interest: An assessment

This paper provides an assessment of some fairness notions that are particularly relevant to economics of the marketplace. Motivations of fairness are also discussed. In this vein, three sources of fairness are outlined: moral precepts, stable convention, and reciprocity. Some suitable theoretical and empirical evidence are presented in support of these views. Economic models based on the view that man is purely selfish have performed poorly in some areas, particularly game theory and voluntary contributions to public goods. In other social sciences, notably in psychology, political science, and sociobiology researchers have also encountered systematic deviations from purely selfish behavior. There is ample evidence that both fairness and self-interest matter. It is hoped that this paper will provide a better comprehension of the tensions and complementarities between fairness and self-interest and improve our understanding of human behavior.     

Sex, self-interest and health care priorities

In this questionnaire study, individuals were asked to prioritise publicly provided preventive health care services, one of which would be unavailable to them by virtue of their sex. The aim was to establish whether men and women would exhibit different degrees of self-interest when making a constrained choice. Around 1800 subjects from east-central England prioritised three different types of cancer screening. Most also provided written explanations for their rankings and these were classified into explanatory themes. Logistic regressions using socio-demographic and attitude data predicted the type of screening chosen as first priority. The analysis revealed that many men and women did indeed assign similar priorities to the different types of screening and, even when the priorities differed, these were often justified by similar arguments relating to technical aspects of the interventions and to self-interest. However, women were far more likely than men to prioritise a type of screening from which they themselves would benefit directly and the variations in preferences and explanations between the sexes occurred primarily because of differences in other-regarding attitudes. The bias towards screening of females was driven by women's greater worries about the disease in question and by men's “benevolent sexism” with respect to women's wellbeing.     

Group-based trust,trustworthiness and voluntary cooperation: Evidence from experimental and survey data in China

Trust, trustworthiness and cooperation are crucial in achieving social goals, and are thus essential components of social capital. This paper reports the results of a series of lab and artefactual field experiments carried out in Shanghai to evaluate some of the key indicators of social capital in China. The groups selected for the study are middle school and undergraduate university students and community residents. The experiments comprise two public goods games, a gambling game and a trust game. The overall level of trust is negatively related to age, although trusting behavior is also affected by other factors, such as risk-taking.     

Evaluating theory-based evaluation: information, norms, and adherence

Programmatic social interventions attempt to produce appropriate social-norm-guided behavior in an open environment. A marriage of applicable psychological theory, appropriate program evaluation theory, and outcome of evaluations of specific social interventions assures the acquisition of cumulative theory and the production of successful social interventions - the marriage permits us to advance knowledge by making use of both success and failures. We briefly review well-established principles within the field of program evaluation, well-established processes involved in changing social norms and social-norm adherence, the outcome of several program evaluations focusing on smoking prevention, pro-environmental behavior, and rape prevention and, using the principle of learning from our failures, examine why these programs often do not perform as expected. Finally, we discuss the promise of learning from our collective experiences to develop a cumulative science of program evaluation and to improve the performance of extant and future interventions.     

Choosing an electoral rule: Values and self-interest in the lab

We study the choice of multi-person bargaining protocols in the context of politics. In politics, citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic rules, for instance via referendums. If they support the rule that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment, in which 252 subjects participated. In the first stage, these subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second stage, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. We find that egalitarian values that subjects hold outside of the lab shape their choice of electoral rule in the second stage when a rule led to a fairer distribution of payoffs compared to the other one in the first stage. The implication is that people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for decision rules.     

Liability of commercial and social hosts for alcohol-related injuries: a national survey of accountability norms and judgments

Legal standards for liability of commercial sellers and social providers of alcoholic beverages are affected by social norms concerning accountability and responsibility. Using a nationwide probability sample telephone survey of 7,021 U.S. residents, we conducted a randomized experiment in which each subject was asked to respond to multiple vignettes. The vignettes told stories of drinking situations, systematically varying dimensions concerning age of drinker, commercial versus social settings, amount of alcohol consumed, history of previous behavior, and seriousness of damage or injury following drinking. Analyses involved linear mixed (i.e., random effects) model regressions, using responses to vignettes as the outcome variable, controlling for a series of sociodemographic, behavioral, and attitudinal measures. Results showed that age of drinker (young), setting (bar), and previous behavior (history of irresponsibility) were most strongly associated with harsher judgments of civil liability. Citizens' multiple standards for assigning legal liability and implications for public policy are discussed.     

Arbitrator bias and self-interest: Lessons from the baseball labor market

Their desire for enduring employment is commonly assumed to induce arbitrators to make fair awards. We find, however, that in major league baseball's unique institutional setting, selfinterested behavior by arbitrators has led to bias against players and preservation of monopsony rents for team owners. We apply a standard model of arbitrator behavior to all 391 arbitrated cases in baseball since 1979. Under conditions that should lead to an even split in awards to teams and players, probit analysis indicates that arbitrators favor teams 61 percent of the time. Furthermore, bias against African-American and Latinborn players is even more pronounced.     

Volunteering,pro-environmental attitudes and norms

In the spirit of previous work in the compliance literature (e.g., tax, littering), we investigate whether environmental social norms affect volunteering in environmental organizations. Using two ‘environmental morale’ variables as indirect measures, we analyze the impact of social norms on the incidence of unpaid work in environmental organizations. In addition, we test whether violation of a specific environmental norm initiates a conditional cooperation response. We explore a large individual data set covering 32 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe, and extend the number of countries investigated to test the robustness of the relationship at the macro level. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between the proxies for environmental social norms and volunteering in environmental organizations. The relationship persists despite our various robustness checks.     

Social norms, partnerships and children

This paper presents a social norms interpretation to explain cross-country differences in partnership formation rates. Social norms are modeled as a constraint on the allocation of household labor that diminishes the gains of entering a partnership, especially for highly educated women with a higher opportunity cost of time. Results using individual level data from 7 waves of the European Community Household Panel (1995?C2001) confirm the predictions from the theory. These results are robust to controlling for country varying factors such as childcare policies and divorce rates, and are mostly driven by marriage (as opposed to cohabitation) decisions. Given that household formation is a necessary prerequisite to having children, our results potentially shed light onto the process of below replacement fertility and the economic challenges associated with it.     

Associations,civic norms,and democracy: Revisiting the Italian case

By exploring associational life in early modern Italy, which the arguments of neo-Tocquevillians such as Robert Putnam explore, this article critically reconsiders the effects of associations upon democracy. By revealing how rich associational life resulted in the establishment of Fascism, I argue that associations do not necessarily contribute to the stabilization of democracy.In order to account better for meanings of associations, I emphasize transformation of identities of associations in a political and ideological context.     

Followers and leaders: Reciprocity,social norms and group behavior

This paper proposes a model of norm-driven preferences and studies the determinants of norm compliance in games. It predicts that (i) compliance follows a law of demand and (ii) people respect norms in a reciprocal manner: they are more likely to comply if others are expected to comply too. Reciprocal norm compliance might explain why successful revolutions or strikes grow in a snow-balled fashion, leaders motivate others to join social movements, or sequential mechanisms (instead of simultaneous ones) are usually employed in charity fundraising.     

Free enterprise, professional ideology, and self-interest: an analysis of resistance by Canadian physicians to universal health insurance

Under Canada's universal health care system, physicians are remunerated through government-run health insurance plans; a private market for physicians' services is virtually nonexistent. A proposal to ban the practice of extra-billing, whereby some physicians billed patients for amounts over and above insured rates, met with physicians' opposition. The particular constellation of legislative, social, and political events that followed the proposed ban presented a unique opportunity to explore the nature of the medical profession's resistance to encroachment on professional autonomy. The results of this survey of physicians in four specialties (N = 313) in metropolitan Toronto suggest that resistance to universal health insurance is complex; it involves a prevailing social ideology among physicians, which happens to be antiwelfare and conservative generally, entangled with economic self-interest and a specific set of beliefs about medical practice and physicians' rights and privileges.     

Wired: energy drinks, jock identity, masculine norms, and risk taking

OBJECTIVE: The author examined gendered links among sport-related identity, endorsement of conventional masculine norms, risk taking, and energy-drink consumption. PARTICIPANTS: The author surveyed 795 undergraduate students enrolled in introductory-level courses at a public university. METHODS: The author conducted linear regression analyses of energy-drink consumption frequencies on sociodemographic characteristics, jock identity, masculine norms, and risk-taking behavior. RESULTS: Of participants, 39% consumed an energy drink in the past month, with more frequent use by men (2.49 d/month) than by women (1.22 d/month). Strength of jock identity was positively associated with frequency of energy-drink consumption; this relationship was mediated by both masculine norms and risk-taking behavior. CONCLUSIONS: Sport-related identity, masculinity, and risk taking are components of the emerging portrait of a toxic jock identity, which may signal an elevated risk for health-compromising behaviors. College undergraduates' frequent consumption of Red Bull and comparable energy drinks should be recognized as a potential predictor of toxic jock identity.     

Social norms, inequality and child labor

This paper theoretically analyzes a situation wherein adults’ decisions on child labor are affected not only by materialistic utility but also by a social norm against child labor. The adult thus faces a tradeoff; on the one hand, household income rises if she sends her child to work. On the other hand, the adult suffers disutility from violating the social norm in so doing. We also suppose that the extent of disutility falls as more other adults have their children work. We then explore how the total amount of child labor in an economy changes as adults’ labor efficiencies rise or become more unequal. Our analysis reveals that a more equal distribution or rises in adults’ labor efficiency help decrease child labor only under certain conditions.     

Religion,ethnicity and cooperation: An experimental study

We investigate how cross-cutting ethnic and religious identities as well as the strength of individual religiosity and fundamentalism affect individual cooperation. In a repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment, information about subjects’ religious and ethnic identities was either revealed or concealed to examine the individual and joint effects of these influences on subject decisions. While subjects’ knowledge of others’ religious and ethnic difference has no net effect on their cooperativeness, the awareness of similarity increases it. Subject religiosity and fundamentalism have no independent effect on cooperation, but they enhance ethnic and religious intergroup effects.     

Social norms, rationales and policies: reframing farmland protection in Israel

This paper analyzes the role of legitimization processes in the struggle over farmland protection policies in Israel. In the early sixties a centralized farmland protection program was institutionalized, curtailing private land owners‘ and leaseholders’ property rights on farmlands. The legitimacy accorded to such measures is explained as a function of the congruence between social norms, power structure and dominant ideology at the time. Then, the paper follows the changes in power, ideology, social norms, sanctioned discourse and the role of agriculture in the economy. These changes undermined the basis of the farmland protection rationales, and led to a crisis of legitimacy in the early nineties. As a result of several institutional and policy shifts in the early nineties, a time of rapid growth, concern shifted to the implications of growth for the future of open spaces. This concern over the loss of positive externalities was shared by environmentalists, urban and exurban consumption interests, planners and several elements within the rural establishment. As a result a new set of plans was introduced. Focusing on the central district, where the most severe development pressures are felt, the paper compares the sanctioned discourse and use of rationales in the new plans and documents to those of previous plans. These plans focus on averting the loss of positive externalities, rather than productive capacity, and are couched in economic terms, rather than ideological terms, reflecting the shift in language of the sanctioned discourse. It shows that the choice of rationales for legitimizing countryside conservation reflects the struggle over rural landscapes, as the rationales are used to cobble a coalition of planners, environmentalists, farmers, urbanites and exurbanites, against a powerful development coalition.