PROJECT MANAGER: BERTIL TUNGODDEN 

PROJECT DURATION: 2027-2032

Concerns about the fairness of market transactions lie at the heart of today’s pressing challenges in economic governance. Modern economies depend on markets not only to allocate resources efficiently, but also in ways perceived as fair, voluntary, and legitimate. Yet across sectors—from pharmaceuticals and finance to digital platforms and labor—citizens question transactions that are perceived as manipulative and to generate unequal gains and decrease overall welfare. Fair Markets breaks new ground by offering the first unified empirical framework for understanding how people judge the fairness and moral legitimacy of voluntary market transactions. It shifts the focus of fairness research from distributive outcomes to the legitimacy of market exchanges, opening an entirely new frontier for studying market legitimacy and for rethinking the moral foundations of fairness research by linking two insights from behavioral economics—people care about unfairness, and firms exploit predictable biases.

The project introduces a novel conceptual model—the EFF model—where individuals evaluate transactions by three normative principles: Efficiency, Freedom, and Fairness. It combines incentivized experiments, survey vignettes, open-ended reasoning, and panel and register data. Three components structure the research: (1) experiments identify when transactions are judged unfair or exploitative; (2) a large scale Norwegian panel traces how moral views form, evolve, and shape behavior using administrative registers; (3) a global survey in 60+ countries maps variation in fairness views and introduces the Global Fair Markets Index, which compares citizens’ policy attitudes to actual consumer protection frameworks. At its core, Fair Markets rests on a simple idea: markets remain legitimate only if they align with public moral views. Building on this premise, the project delivers the first empirical foundation for rethinking the moral legitimacy of markets today.

Financing: European Research Council Advanced Grant