Fairness Preference of Preschoolers and the Effects of Family Background in China

Purpose:This study investigates the fairness preference of five-year-old children in Shanghai,observing their distributive behaviors in both stakeholder and spectator games and showing how this behavior is linked to their family background.Design/Approach/Methods:Participants had to make distributive choices in two experiments and distribute between themselves and another participant in the first choice.They had to distribute between two other participants in luck,merit,or efficiency situations in the second choice.Findings:The results suggest that preschoolers showed a preference for splitting equally between themselves and another participant.The second choice showed a significant difference in fairness preference under a situation of luck between genders,and only children were more likely to accept an unequal allocation than those who had siblings.Originality/Value:We believe that our study makes a significant contribution to the literature because it illustrates the variety of factors that can influence a child's fairness preference and fairness behavior and suggests when and how these aspects develop in children.Further,this is an original study exploring the fairness preference of preschoolers in Shanghai using an experimental economics method.

Service Mechanism and Pricing Based on Fairness Preference of Customers in Queuing System

Service providers often adopt the mechanism of customer classification due to the heterogeneity of customer waiting cost. However, the classification service may cause unfairness feeling of regular customers, then affect the revenue and social welfare. This paper provides the first exact analysis about the situation that service providers offer two classes of non-preemptive priority service when customer fairness perception is explicitly modeled. We model customer fairness perception as a negative utility on regular customers that’s proportional to the waiting time difference between the two queues. By analyzing a stylized M/M/1 queue in monopoly service system, we can derive important results some of which reaffirm existed research results. First, from the perspective of revenue maximization, service providers should adopt the mechanism of customer classification and set up the two kinds of customers where they can see each other. Next, considering customer utility maximization,service providers should cancel the mechanism of customer classification, and keep one queue(regular customers) only. Then, from the perspective of social welfare maximization, service providers shouldalso adopt the mechanism of customer classification but set up the two kinds of customers where they cannot feel each other. Finally, this paper concludes the optimal pricing based on customer classification in the above three different perspectives. This research shows important reference value and practical significance for service providers who adopt the mechanism of classification service.