Title: Utilitarian Meritocrats or Conformist Meritocrats? A Redistribution Experiment in China and France (joint work with Yuchen Huang (Paris School of Economics and EHESS) and Zhexun Mo (Paris School of Economics and World Inequality Lab))

Abstract: Recent experimental evidence suggests that meritocratic ideals are mainly a Western phenomenon. Puzzlingly, the Chinese public do not differentiate between merit and luck-based inequalities, despite having highly meritocratic historical institutions. We run a redistribution experiment with elite university students in China and France, investigating two hypotheses: first, that Chinese respondents value meritocracy as a means rather than an end (“consequentialist” rather than “deontological” meritocrats); second, that they exhibit a greater status quo bias. Preliminary results indicate that although Chinese respondents systematically redistribute less than the French, they behave, like French respondents, as deontological meritocrats, implementing more redistribution when merit differences are small or hard to determine. A large part of the overall difference in redistribution is driven by greater reluctance to change the status quo in the Chinese sample. We further show that the Chinese status quo conformity is driven by children of public servants, workers and farmers, but is nearly non-existent for children of private enterprise owners. Finally, we construct and estimate a structural model of distribution choice under conformism, to disentangle preferred distributions from implemented distributions.