I Deserve More! An Experimental Analysis of Illusory Ownership in Dictator Games

Delineation of someone's ownership typically involves the sense of
deservedness: the property right is respected as long as the owner
deserve to own the object. Objectively, deservedness is often linked
to one's actions or specific attributes that justify the owner's claims.
We argue that people might get the sense of deservedness without an
objective causal attribution. In our experiment, the pure luck defines
the allocation of the roles. Still, compared to a standard setting, in a
treatment where actions have no causal effect on the outcome, dictators
keep larger share. At the same time, dictators do not compensate
recipients for their irrelevant actions. We interpret this asymmetry in
reaction towards the procedures of role allocation as 'illusory property':
people care about irrelevant procedures only if they favor themselves
but not others.