Inequality & Opportunity

A Pinch of Opportunity Makes Deep Inequality More Palatable

ScienceDaily (July 26, 2012) — Just a tiny hint of opportunity has a disproportionately powerful effect -- making unfairness more acceptable to disadvantaged people, new research has found.

A study by Eugenio Proto, an economist from the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) at the University of Warwick and two other co-authors, looked at decision-making and how it was influenced by people's perceptions of fairness.

Researchers set up a game between two people where one person (the proposer) offers to split £10 between themselves and their partner, with the proposer able to decide the exact amount he or she is willing to offer.

If that amount is not accepted by to the second person (the responder) then neither gets any money.

Known as an ultimatum game, this kind of set-up is frequently studied by economists -- but for the first time the CAGE experiment introduced an element of inequality via an increasingly-biased rigged lottery to decide who becomes the proposer, the stronger of the two positions./.../