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When the means justify the ends: effects of observability on the procedural fairness and distributive fairness of resource allocations
Author(s) -
Hamilton Rebecca W.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.527
Subject(s) - distributive property , observability , resource allocation , resource (disambiguation) , distributive justice , procedural justice , resource use , microeconomics , computer science , social psychology , psychology , economics , economic justice , environmental resource management , computer network , perception , mathematics , neuroscience , pure mathematics
Abstract While there is substantial research examining how recipients react to allocations that vary in procedural fairness (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001), previous research has not examined how those dividing resources among themselves and others manipulate procedural fairness (Tyler & Smith, 1998). In this paper, we introduce a measure that allows us to compare procedural fairness across resource allocations, and we use an experimental procedure in which participants vary the procedural fairness of their allocations. In three studies, we show that those dividing resources make proactive tradeoffs between distributive and procedural fairness. Participants increased the procedural fairness of their allocations when they knew recipients would observe their procedures, but they were less likely to divide the resources equally among recipients. The decreased emphasis on distributive fairness when procedures were observable resulted in higher joint outcomes, suggesting that the observability of procedures has important implications for the efficiency of resource allocation in groups. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.