Johanna Mollerstrom, Humboldt University

A meritocratic origin of egalitarian behavior

Abstract

Meritocratic fairness preferences are held by many, and imply that inequalities are only viewed as acceptable if they come about through factors such as merit or effort. When there is no uncertainty about who the best performer is, being a meritocrat is straight-forward, and behavior in such situations has been studied extensively. We focus instead on the highly realistic, but previously under-studied, context where it is not clear if the highest earner is also the best performer. Under such uncertainty, meritocrats trade off making the larger (but less likely) mistake of rewarding the wrong person with the smaller (but more likely) mistake of not rewarding the right person enough. We show theoretically that meritocrats will be more likely to equalize resources, i.e. to exhibit an egalitarian behavior, if they put a larger weight on avoiding large mistakes as opposed to merely minimizing the expected error. Using a lab experiment, we show that among the numerous meritocrats that are present in our sample, behavior consistent with such an overweighting is very common. We further document that this, in line with our theoretical prediction, leads to the meritocrats’ behavior being pushed significantly in the direction of an egalitarian style, but away from a libertarian style, behavior.