This paper investigates the influence of strategic choice and strategic luck on individuals’ preferences for redistribution, extending the existing literature on inequality and fairness in experimental economics. While much of the previous research has examined non‑strategic settings where individuals’ decisions are independent and luck is typically conceptualised as a lottery, this study introduces a strategic environment where incomes are shaped by both individual choices and the decisions of others. Furthermore, luck is redefined as a factor determined by others’ choices rather than a random lottery. Each participant participates in two blocks: Block 1 introduces a novel strategic environment based on a pure coordination game (PC), followed by redistribution over 30 rounds; Block 2 employs a standardised adaptation of the experiment from Cappelen et al. (2013) to measure preferences under non‑strategic choice and luck. The findings reveal that factors such as initial income distributions exert more significant effects on individuals’ preferences for redistribution compared to the impact of strategic and non‑strategic choice and strategic and non‑strategic luck.
Sheheryar Banuri, Amir Jafarzadeh, Robert Sugden
Do concerns about the fairness of procedures translate into stronger redistributive preferences? In this paper, we examine the relationship between procedural fairness and preferences for redistribution, by designing a laboratory experiment in which participants first play a card game with either symmetric or asymmetric opportunity sets (i.e. fair or unfair rules) and then make a dictator-style transfer decision over the resulting unequal payoffs, according to the theoretical framework introduced by Sugden and Wang (2020). We find that participants redistribute similar amounts across fair and unfair conditions, even though they clearly recognize the unequal-opportunity condition as less fair. The results therefore point to a clear limit of procedural fairness: individuals may perceive unequal opportunities as unfair without responding through corrective redistribution. More broadly, the findings suggest that outcome based considerations play a stronger role than procedural ones when individuals decide whether to reduce inequality. We contribute to the literature by distinguishing between fairness judgments and redistribution choices in a controlled experimental setting.
Amir Jafarzadeh, Robert Sugden
It is well known that in Pure Coordination (PC) games in which strategies are distinguished by payoff-irrelevant labels, players are often able to coordinate their strategy choices by choosing the most ‘prominent’ label. The same prominence cues are known to influence behaviour in other games with multiple Nash equilibria. However, game theory has lacked a predictive theory of the determinants of prominence. In this paper, we develop and implement a general method of defining and validating empirical concepts of prominence, and apply it to three general concepts discussed in previous literature. We use an experimental data base of $2\times2$ PC games constructed randomly from 60 familiar labels belonging to 10 familiar categories. We find that participants can coordinate successfully in most categories. The frequencies with which labels are chosen are well predicted by ‘book rank’---the category-specific frequency with which each label’s text string appears in recently published books. This is a measure of each label’s mere appearance in discourse, in contrast to the less predictive concepts of ‘search rank’ (being the object of current interest) and ‘web rank’ (being highly ranked in terms of popularity, fame or significance). The predictive power of book rank suggests that players of PC games align their expectations by using intuitive mental processes of interactive alignment rather than by conscious use of principles of rationality. We find further support for this conclusion in the shortness and stability of players’ response times and in the absence of individual-level heterogeneity in use of prominence concepts.