Understanding social mobility – An experimental Approach

Period: December 2022 – November 2025
Amount: Euro 247’000
Ada Kovaliukaite and Jean-Robert Tyran (PI) 

This project develops a novel framework to study the structural determinants of social mobility and the democratic acceptance of equal-opportunity policies. The research combines:

1. a formal economic model of asymmetric contests for education and status;
2. laboratory experiments implementing this model;
3. a voting module examining democratic approval of alternative policies when decision makers are affected by policies;
4. a large-scale online “policy lab” testing how support for equal-opportunity policies is shaped by political framing, information, and motivated beliefs. Decision makers are recruited from the general population, and are in the role of impartial spectators whose choices are consequential for (5)
5. laboratory participants subsequently play the contest experiment according to the equal-opportunity choices made online.

We successfully developed a theoretical workhorse model of asymmetric contests which allows studying the determinants of economic success (skill, effort, luck; privilege, talent) in equilibrium and implemented a laboratory setting allowing  to study these effects behaviorally.

Project news

A first study applying the "policy lab" approach to issues of social mobility has been presented by Ada Kovaliukaite in the VCEE seminar on November 10 2025. The preliminary title and abstract of the paper is:

Resisting Policy Advice: 
Experimental Evidence on the Perception of Social Mobility

We study the resilience of policy preferences in the face of competing narratives. Using a novel “Policy Lab” framework, we integrate a controlled laboratory contest with a representative sample of 3,600 U.S. spectators who act as policymakers. Spectators decide whether to implement affirmative action for laboratory contestants whose outcomes are determined by unequal structural advantages (derived from either luck or skill). We investigate whether truthful expert advice regarding the source of inequality can withstand a misleading “meritocratic slant”—a narrative attributing success to effort. We find that the slant is highly effective: it significantly dampens support for redistribution, even when spectators have been truthfully informed that the inequality is due to luck. Concise factual corrections are insufficient to neutralize this narrative. However, providing full information—revealing the detailed institutional mechanism of the advantage— successfully debunks the slant and restores support for affirmative action. Our results hold across the political spectrum, suggesting that while partisan groups process concise advice differently, institutional transparency can align preferences and mitigate polarization.