Entitlements, Rights, and Fairness: Some Experimental Results

Abstract

"This paper reports the results of a set of experiments designed to test our hypothesis about subjects' attitudes towards the connection between methods of allocating property entitlements and the fairness (or justice) of regarding those entitlements as rights. We generate testable hypotheses by making a theoretical connection of the following sort: if a subject holds a particular theory of fairness about entitlements and rights, then he will tend to act in certain ways."