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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 107 No. 3 2025

Too Lucky to Be True: Fairness Views under the Shadow of Cheating

Stefania Bortolotti1; Ivan Soraperra2; Matthias Sutter3; Claudia Zoller4

1 University of Bologna & IZA · 2 Center for Humans and Machines, Max Planck Institute for Human Development Berlin · 3 Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn, University of Cologne, and University of Innsbruck · 4 Management Center Innsbruck

open access

Abstract

Income inequalities within societies are often associated with evidence that the rich are more likely to behave unethically and evade more taxes. We study how fairness views and preferences for redistribution are affected when cheating may, but need not, be the cause of income inequalities. In our experiment, we let third parties redistribute income between a rich and a poor stakeholder. In one treatment, income inequality was due only to luck, whereas in two others rich stakeholders might have cheated. The mere suspicion of cheating changes third parties’ fairness views considerably and leads to a strong polarization that is even more pronounced when cheating generates negative externalities.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_01394
Volume
107
Issue
3
Pages
771-785
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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