Fairness, personal responsibility, and the welfare state (FPRWS)

The aim of the research project Fairness, personal responsibility and the welfare state is to analyze how fairness considerations, in particular with respect to personal responsibility, affect the support and effectiveness of welfare policies. The European welfare states are faced with important challenges, in particular related to financial strains on the welfare system, changing migration flows and increasing inequality. Partly as a response to these challenges, there is an increasing focus on personal responsibility. The proposed research project provides new knowledge about how the welfare states can meet these challenges and how concerns for personal responsibility can be integrated in the design of welfare schemes in a way that is perceived as fair. Four research teams from Norway, the Netherlands, and Austria will take a cross-disciplinary perspective on fairness and use an innovative combination of methods, including administrative register data, surveys, as well as field and laboratory experiments. The Vienna-based group is headed by Jean-Robert Tyran who is an expert in experimental economics. He has studied issues central to this project like taxation and tax evasion, the acceptance and emergence of endogenous institutions, fairness and voting on redistribution, and fairness and trust. The project will benefit both from access to state-of-the-art infrastructure at the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics (VCEE) and from Tyrans experience with conducting large-scale incentivized experiments over the internet. The Vienna-based group plans to contribute to all parts of the project. However, priority will be given to subprojects Attribution of personal responsibility, Type 1 and Type 2 errors in welfare policies, Fairness and tax evasion and Fairness and trust.

The research project Fairness, personal responsibility and the welfare state analyzed how fairness considerations, in particular with respect to personal responsibility, affect the support and effectiveness of welfare policies. The European welfare states are faced with important challenges, in particular related to financial strains on the welfare system, changing migration flows and increasing inequality. Partly as a response to these challenges, there is an increasing focus on personal responsibility. This research project provides new knowledge about how the welfare states can meet these challenges and how concerns for personal responsibility can be integrated in the design of welfare schemes in a way that is perceived as fair. Four research teams from Norway, the Netherlands, and Austria, took a cross- disciplinary perspective on fairness and use an innovative combination of methods, including administrative register data, surveys, as well as field and laboratory experiments.