From principles to practice: distributive justice and the role of perceived inequality in reward allocation.

ABSTRACT: How do people balance competing principles of distributive justice when allocating limited goods? This study applies a novel methodological approach-distributional survey experiments (DSEs)-to examine how people weigh merit, need and equality considerations when deciding how to distribute salaries to people with different ascriptive characteristics and occupations. In the DSE, that we embedded in a representative Swiss survey, respondents were asked to allocate a fixed sum among three hypothetical hospital employees with experimentally varying attributes. This design not only allows us to identify causal factors behind allocation decisions but also captures the underlying interdependence involved in questions of distributive justice. What is more, we can examine drivers of the resulting in

SUBMITTER: Gilgen S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12738866 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature