Do Strict Egalitarians Really Exist?

The purpose of our study is to verify the argument of Cappelen et al. (2007) that insists on the pluralism of fairness ideals. Their experiments are based on the dictator game with production, and they suggest that three fairness ideals exist: strict egalitarianism, libertarianism, and liberal egalitarianism. However, because of the characteristics of the dictator game, the egoistic behavior of taking all of the endowments is a reasonable decision and cannot be ignored. In this paper, we show by estimation of modified models that strict egalitarians do not exist but that egoists do. We assume that people who follow different fairness ideals also place different weights on fairness, and we separate the weight parameter by the three fairness ideals. Especially in the case of strict egalitarianism, the estimated value of the weight parameter indicates that strict egalitarians behave like egoists who take all of the total product. This result implies that people rarely follow the strict egalitarian ideal under this kind of dictator game with a production phase and, instead, a high proportion of egoists take the total product without considering any fairness ideals.