Provision of Community Social Services: The Role of Distributive Fairness for Willingness to Pay

In an attempt to generalize the GEF hypothesis (H. A. M. Wilke, 1991) to a real-life public-goods dilemma, the main question asked in three studies was whether perceived distributive fairness affects willingness to pay for community child care. In the first study, attitudes towards whether the quality of child care should be distributed equally to all children, according to the needs of the children, or proportional to how much the children’s parents pay were surveyed in 1,840 Swedish parents living in five municipalities of different sizes. Preferences for different methods of payment were also measured. Although the results lent some support to the hypothesis that perceived distributive fairness plays a role, other factors were found to have a stronger effect on willingness to pay. The main survey results were replicated and extended in two additional studies employing a hypothetical society paradigm in which undergraduates were asked to respond to scenarios.