Elena Cettolin

Justice under Uncertainty

Uncertain outcomes are an inevitable feature of policy choices and their public support often depends on their perceived justice. Surprisingly little is known about how people perceive justice under uncertainty. We theoretically and experimentally explore just allocations of resources when recipients are exposed to certainty or uncertainty. In the experiment, uninvolved participants (called Spectators) unequivocally choose to allocate resources equally between recipients, when there is no uncertainty. In stark contrast, with uncertainty just allocations are widely dispersed. Moreover, on average, uninvolved participants allocate less to recipients exposed to higher degrees of uncertainty. The observed allocations can be well organized by four different theoretical views of justice under uncertainty, indicating that uninvolved participants differ fundamentally in their views on justice under uncertainty.

Revealed Incomplete Preferences Under Uncertainty: Evidence for Bewley Preferences

We present a set of experiments testing for incomplete preferences due to uncertainty. In a first experiment, we observe that approximately half of the participants exhibit a choice pattern inconsistent with models assuming complete preferences and Certainty Independence (CI). To understand these participants’ behavior, in a second experiment, we design a decision task that distinguishes between models assuming complete preferences and relaxing CI and models of incomplete preferences under uncertainty. We find that about half of the participants in question exhibit behavior consistent with incomplete preferences, about one third shows behavior consistent with a preference for randomization between risky and ambiguous prospects, and the remaining participants’ behavior is consistent with both types of preferences. In further experiments we find that the observed choice pattern cannot be attributed to probability weighting, choice mistakes, regret aversion or intransitive indifference under risk and certainty. We also show that the observed behavior is robust to a prize variation in the ambiguous prospect.

Partial Coercion, Conditional Cooperation, and Self-Commitment in Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods

In this paper we experimentally investigate whether partial coercion can in combination with conditional cooperation increase contributions to a public good. We are especially interested in the behavior of the non-coerced populations. The main finding is that in our setting conditional cooperation is not a strong enough force to increase contribution levels. Although, non-coerced subjects rationally adjust their beliefs about contribution behavior of coerced subjects they do not increase their own contributions to the public good accordingly. This points to the limits of the actual strength of conditional cooperation and puts some doubt on the idea that it is crucial in overcoming social dilemma problems.