When fair Isn’t fair: Understanding choice reversals involving social preferences

In settings with uncertainty, tension exists between ex ante and ex post notions of fairness. Subjects in an experimentmost commonly select the ex ante fair alternative ex ante and switch to the ex post fair alternative ex post.One potential explanation embraces consequentialism and construes reversals as time inconsistent. Another abandons consequentialism in We thank participants at the 2015 Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics Psychology and Economics Workshop, the 2016 American Economic Association meetings, the 2016 New England Experimental Economics Workshop, the 2016 Early Career Behavioral Economics Conference, the 2017 Economic Science Association meetings, the 10th Maastricht Behavioral and Experimental Economics Symposium, and seminars at Columbia, Texas favor of deontological (rule-based) ethics and thereby avoids the implication that revisions imply inconsistency.We test these explanations by examining contingent planning and the demand for commitment. Our findings suggest that the most common attitude toward fairness involves a time-consistent preference for applying a naive deontological heuristic.