Economic games involving allocation of resources have been a useful tool for the study of decision making for both psychologists and economists. In two experiments involving a repeated-trials game over twenty opportunities, undergraduates made choices to distribute resources between themselves and an unseen, passive other either optimally (for themselves) but non-competitively, equally but non-optimally, or least optimally but competitively. Surprisingly, whether participants were told that the anonymous other was another student or a computer did not matter. Using such terms as “game” and “player” in the course of the session was associated with an increased frequency of competitive behavior. Males were more optimal than females: a gender-by-incentive interaction was found in the first experiment. In agreement with prior research, participants whose resources were backed by monetary incentive acted the most optimally. Overall, equality was the modal strategy employed, although it is clear that motivational context affects the allocation of resources.

How do individuals’ fairness judgments affect their political evaluations? This article argues that when citizens perceive high levels of distributive unfairness in society, they will be less satisfied with the way democracy functions. Yet good governance—that is, impartiality in the exercise of political authority—should mitigate the negative influence of perceived distributive unfairness on satisfaction. Using a cross-national analysis of 18 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2015, this study demonstrates that individuals are significantly less satisfied with democracy when they perceive their country’s income distribution as unfair. Yet good governance significantly offsets this negative relationship, even in a region with the highest level of inequality in the world. These findings imply that policymakers can bolster democratic satisfaction, even in places where citizens perceive the income distribution as fundamentally unfair, by committing to good governance and fair democratic procedures.

As emissions trading regimes become increasingly popular mechanisms for environmental pollution control around the world, environmentalists are asking whether market-based programmes meet their promise of both efficient and equitable pollution reductions. The emissions trading regime of the USA's Acid Rain Programme (ARP) is investigated in order to determine whether the programme has concentrated sulphur dioxide (SO2) pollution disproportionately for the poor and people of colour. While the USA emissions trading regime has been hailed as a success for cost-efficiently reducing pollution in the aggregate, critics contend that the programme is insufficiently attentive to the localized concentrations of harmful SO2 that trading can create. Further, advocates of environmental justice question whether emissions trading might exacerbate the disproportionate pollution burdens already facing the poor and people of colour. Stack emissions and pollution allowance holdings for all 110 power plants participating in Phase I of the trading programme are correlated with income and racial demographic characteristics of the people living around each plant to determine whether the ARP might raise distributive environmental justice concerns. Using USA Census data at the tract level, income and racial demographics around plants that increased and decreased their emissions as well as plants that were net purchasers and sellers of pollution allowances over the first three years of the programme are compared. For the first few years of the ARP, the emissions trading regime does not appear to have been concentrating SO2 pollution disproportionately for the poor and racial minority populations.