Essays on Empirical Labor and Health Economics
On Wednesday 24 May 2023 Sara Abrahamsson will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Three chapters on Fairness Preferences
On Tuesday 30 May 2023 Kjetil Røiseland Madland will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend his thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Kjetil Røiseland Madland´s thesis consists of three chapters, which all study some aspect of distributive justice.
The thesis contributes to the literature on social preferences and the literature on deviations from rational behavior and attempts to build a bridge between the two. This is done through four incentivized experiments, studying a total of over 5000 individual responses. In all the experiments the decision makers take the role as impartial spectators who distribute money between anonymous workers.
The first chapter, “Habits of equality: An experimental study of path dependence in fairness preferences” studies whether distributive decisions are path dependent, i.e. depend on previous decisions, first in the trade-off between fairness and efficiency, and then in the willingness to accept inequalities that are due to merit and luck, respectively. Results from both experiments indicate that distributive decisions are affected by habit formation.
The second chapter, “Fairness of the crowd: An experimental study of social spillovers in fairness decisions” studies the effects of different levels of a social norm signal on distributive decisions. We find that decision makers’ willingness to split money equally between a pair of stakeholders is affected by a signal about the number of people in a reference group that have split equally in a similar past experiment.
The third paper, “Fairness and attribute range: An experimental study of range-based context effects in fairness decisions”, studies how distributive decisions may be affected by the range of alternatives available in the choice set.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
The Significance of Fairness Preferences in Real-World Outcomes Beyond Laboratory Settings
Trial lecture:
Aud M, NHH, 10:15
Title of the thesis:
Three chapters on Fairness Preferences
Defense:
Aud M, NHH, 12:15
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Erik Sørensen (leader of the committee), Department of Economics and FAIR, NHH
Senior assistant professor Agne Kajackaite, University of Milan
Professor Daniele Nosenzo, University of Aarhus
Supervisors:
Professor Bertil Tungodden (main supervisor), Department of Economics and FAIR, NHH
Professor Botond Kőszegi, Central European University
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.
