Fairness considerations fundamentally affect human behavior, but our understanding of the nature and development of people's fairness preferences is limited. The dictator game has been the standard experimental design for studying fairness preferences, but it only captures a situation where there is broad agreement that fairness requires equal split. In real life, people often disagree on what is fair, largely because they disagree on whether individual achievements, luck, and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits, can justify inequalities. We modified the dictator game to capture these elements, and studied how inequality acceptance develops in adolescence. We found as children enter adolescence, they increasingly viewed inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, fair, whereas efficiency considerations mainly played a role in late adolescence.JEL code: D63It is well documented that adult humans are motivated by fairness considerations and are willing to sacrifice personal gains in order to eliminate inequalities they view as unfair (Fehr and Falk, 2002;Camerer, 2003). It is also evident from the political debate, surveys (Schokkaert and Devooght, 2003;Gaertner and Schwettmann, 2007), and economic experiments (Konow, 2000;Frohlich et al., 2004;Cappelen et al., 2007) that most adults view some inequalities as fair. In particular, most adults believe that differences in individual achievements (Konow, 2000;Cherry et al., 2002;Frohlich et al., 2004;Cappelen et al., 2007) and efficiency considerations of what maximizes total benefits (Van Lange, 1999;Andreoni and Miller, 2002;Fisman et al., 2007) may justify an unequal distribution 1 of income, but disagree on whether inequalities reflecting luck are fair (Cappelen et al., 2010(Cappelen et al., , 2007.To illustrate how efficiency and individual achievements may justify an unequal distribution of resources, consider two children, Anne and Carla, who discuss how to divide a cake. Anne appeals to efficiency when she argues that total benefits are maximized by giving her the largest share because she enjoys cake the most. Carla appeals to individual achievements when she argues that she should get the largest share because her contribution to making the cake was largest. The legitimacy of these, and other, fairness considerations have been extensively discussed in the philosophical literature (Rawls, 1971;Nozick, 1974;Sen, 2009), and such considerations are important for how people make decisions in a wide range of situations (Montada, 2002). For example, in the workplace, some may find it fair that a more productive colleague has a higher wage, and, in allocating public funds, some may find it fair to pay some attention to which projects produce the greatest total benefits in the population.Disagreements over questions of fair distribution are fundamental in human life and to get a better understanding of the source of such disagreements it is important to study how fairness views develop in childhood (Moo...

There is a striking difference in income inequality and redistributive policies between the United States and Scandinavia. To study whether there is a corresponding cross-country difference in social preferences, we conducted the first large-scale international social preference experiment, with nationally representative samples from the United States and Norway. We introduce a new experimental approach, which combines the infrastructure of an international online market place and the infrastructure of a leading international data collection agency. A novel feature of our experiment is that Americans and Norwegians make real distributive choices in identical situations where they have complete information about the source of inequality and the cost of redistribution. We show that Americans and Norwegians differ significantly in fairness views, but not in the importance assigned to efficiency. The study also provides robust causal evidence of fairness considerations being much more fundamental for inequality acceptance than efficiency considerations in both countries.

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