Essays in Environmental and Public Economics
On Tuesday 12 August Costanza Maria Ludovica Cincotta will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
How Context Shapes Economic Decision-Making
On Thursday 28 August 2025 Weijia Wang will hold a trial lecture on a prescribed topic and defend her thesis for the PhD degree at NHH.
Fairness preferences play a foundational role in economic decision-making, shaping outcomes in workplaces, markets, and policy design. While fairness is known to influence personal economic choices, less is understood about how it operates when individuals must balance it against practical concerns such as incentives, productivity, and institutional constraints.
This dissertation uses a series of online experiments to examine how context shapes fairness-based decisions when people act as third parties – for example, managers or policymakers – who set rules for others.
The first paper investigates how fairness preferences affect choices between alternative compensation schemes. Participants act as managers choosing between equal pay and a winner-takes-all tournament for real workers. Most believe the tournament increases output but perceive it as less fair. When managers have no personal financial stake, the majority choose equal pay despite expecting lower productivity. When personal incentives are introduced, many switch to the tournament, though some continue to prioritize fairness even at a personal cost.
The second paper examines how the timing of decisions – whether rules are set before or after work is completed – affects redistribution. On average, participants’ choices are not significantly influenced by timing. However, cross-country comparisons show that Swedish participants redistribute more than American participants when decisions are made after work is completed. This gap narrows when rules are set in advance, suggesting that institutional framing can reduce cultural differences in fairness judgments.
The third paper explores how default options shape redistributive choices. Participants are more likely to maintain an unequal distribution when it is the starting point, and to preserve equality when that is the default – underscoring the power of initial framing.
Together, these findings show that fairness is a genuine motivator in decision-making, but one whose expression is shaped by incentives, timing, and context. This has important implications for designing policies that are both fair and effective.
Prescribed topic for the trial lecture:
TBA
Trial lecture:
Aud. Karl Borch, 10:15
Title of the thesis:
Essays on Fairness and Decision Making
Defense:
Aud. Karl Borch, 12:15
Members of the evaluation committee:
Professor Vincent Somville (leader of the committee), Department of Economics, NHH
Professor Christian Zehnder, HEC Lausanne
Associate Professor Simone Haeckl-Schermer, UiS
Supervisors:
Professor Alexander Cappelen (main supervisor), Department of Economics, NHH
Professor Erik Sørensen, Department of Economics, NHH
The trial lecture and thesis defense will be open to the public.
