TY - JOUR AU - Andreoni, James AU - Aydin, Deniz AU - Barton, Blake AU - Bernheim, B. Douglas AU - Naecker, Jeffrey TI - When Fair Isn't Fair: Understanding Choice Reversals Involving Social Preferences JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 25257 PY - 2018 Y2 - November 2018 DO - 10.3386/w25257 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25257 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25257.pdf N1 - Author contact info: James Andreoni Department of Economics University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0508 Tel: 858/534-3832 Fax: 858/534-7040 E-Mail: andreoni@ucsd.edu Deniz Aydin Olin Business School Washington University in St. Louis 1 Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130 E-Mail: daydin@wustl.edu Blake Barton Department of Economics Stanford University 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305 E-Mail: blakeabarton@gmail.com B. Douglas Bernheim Department of Economics Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: 650/725-8732 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: bernheim@stanford.edu Jeffrey Naecker Department of Economics Wesleyan University E-Mail: jnaecker@wesleyan.edu AB - In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness (e.g., equal opportunity versus equal outcomes). In a laboratory experiment, the most common behavioral pattern is for subjects to select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante, and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post. One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes the reversals as manifestations of time inconsistency. Another abandons consequentialism in favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics, and thereby avoids the implication that revisions imply inconsistency. We test between these explanations by examining contingent planning and the demand for commitment. While the population appears to be heterogeneous, our findings suggest that the most common attitude toward fairness involves a time-consistent preference for applying naive deontological rules. ER -