How Does Fairness Relate to Economic Decision-Making? An Experimental Investigation of Pro-Social Behavior

The role of fairness in economic decisions is currently at the center of numerous investigations highlighting pro-social preferences. In this paper, we focus on Amartya K. Sen’s concept of meta-ranking to study sets of preference orderings according to some fair principle. On the one hand, we propose a model based on a meta-utility function to explore different structures of preferences. On the other hand, we run an experimental economic game to test the role of meta-ranking, analyzing the results with a tensor-based method. The meta-ranking confirms the evidence of pro-social behavior in economic decision-making. This is consistent with the findings of the recent economic literature.