We examine the role of need satisfaction in non-comparative justice ratings of endowments with goods. As normative approaches, we discuss utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and three versions of sufficientarianism. Using a vignette experiment with 109 participants, we elicit the participants’ justice ratings of endowments with living space and estimate their justice evaluation functions. We show that a need context increases the prevalence of prioritarianistic and sufficientarianistic justice ratings. Moreover, a need threshold also changes the utilitarians’ justice evaluation functions significantly.

In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution in the public pension system over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked to socioeconomic status having a regressive impact on outcomes. We propose a model that explains this empirical puzzle through the 'alienation' of society from low-income earners and successfully test the model in a real-effort experiment.

A powerful test of Varian’s (1982) generalised axiom of revealed preference (GARP) with two goods requires the consumer’s budget line to pass through two demand vectors revealed as chosen given other budget sets. In an experiment using this idea, each of 41 student subjects faced a series of 16 successive grouped portfolio selection problems. Each group of selection problems had up to three stages, where later budget sets depended on that subject’s choices at earlier stages in the same group. Only 49% of subjects’ choices were observed to satisfy GARP exactly, even by our relatively generous nonparametric test.

Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions.

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In most OECD countries, pension reform policy has decreased the level of intragenerational redistribution over the last three decades, that is, redistribution among members of the same generation with high and low pension entitlements. This trend has occurred despite heterogeneity in life expectancy linked to socioeconomic status having a regressive impact on out-comes. This paper contributes to solving this puzzle by means of a controlled laboratory experiment. We study the causal relationship between inequality of entitlements, mortality risk, and the size of redistribution in a stylized social security system. We find that mortality risk, when negatively correlated with entitlements, significantly lowers subjects’ willingness to redistribute payoffs from high-entitlement to low-entitlement subjects. We explain this finding with efficiency preferences and an alienation effect. The alienation effect is the tendency to attach a lower social weight to the short-lived poor.

We utilize a modified dictator game to analyze whether and how information about the need of recipients affects dictator giving behavior. Need information is presented as objective information about the recipients’ living circumstances (income, public transfers, and travel time to the lab) and subjective information about the recipients’ self-assessment of their need (stated need). The results show that information per se does not increase dictator giving. On average, dictator giving is need sensitive and acknowledges if objective and subjective needs complement each other. Classifying dictators according to their conditional transfers yields that 139 of the 246 (57%) dictators are need sensitive.

We report the results of a vignette study with an online sample of the German adult population in which we analyze the interplay between need, equity, and accountability in third-party distribution decisions. We asked participants to divide firewood between two hypothetical persons who either differ in their need for heat or in their productivity in terms of their ability to chop wood. The study systematically varies the persons' accountability for their neediness as well as for their productivity. We find that participants distribute significantly fewer logs of wood to persons who are held accountable for their disadvantage. Independently of being held accountable or not, the needier person is partially compensated with a share of logs that exceeds her contribution, while the person who contributes less is given a share of logs smaller than her need share. Moreover, there is a domain effect in terms of participants being more sensitive to lower contributions than to greater need.

In many bargaining situations, the distribution of seats or voting weights does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Maaser, Paetzel and Traub (Games and Economic Behavior, 2019) conducted an experiment to investigate the effect of such nominal power differences in the classic Baron–Ferejohn model. This paper re-analyzes the data from that experiment, looking at gender differences in bargaining behavior and in the effect of nominal weights. We find that women and men differ in particular with respect to the proposed distribution of payoffs and coalition size. By contrast, nominal weights have only minor gender-specific effects.

In two experiments, participants had to choose between a sure and a risky option. The sure option was presented either in a gain or a loss frame. Need was defined as a minimum score the participants had to reach. Moreover, choices were made under two different time constraints and with three different levels of induced need to be reached within a fixed number of trials. The two experiments differed with respect to the specific amounts to win and the need levels. The $$2 \times 2 \times 3$$ design was a within-subject design. Data were evaluated on an overall and on a group level, the latter based on participants’ stated risk preference and on revealed preferences (choice proportions) using cluster analysis across subjects. Overall, the results showed riskier behavior when the choice options were presented as losses as compared to gains (framing effect) and when the induced need was highest. Time limits enhanced the framing effect.