Human Studies
IA research on humans mostly occurs in the discipline of economics though it is also studied in sociology.
Research on IA began in 1978 when studies suggested that humans are sensitive to inequities in favor of as well as those against them, and that some people attempt overcompensation when they feel "guilty" or unhappy to have received an undeserved reward.
A more recent definition of IA (resistance to inequitable outcomes) was developed in 1999 by Fehr and Schmidt. They postulated that people make decisions so as to minimize inequity in outcomes. Specifically, consider a setting with individuals {1,2,...,n} who receive pecuniary outcomes xi. Then the utility to person i would be given by
where α parametrizes the distaste of person i for disadvantageous inequality in the first nonstandard term, and β parametrizes the distaste of person i for advantageous inequality in the final term.
Read more about this topic: Inequity Aversion
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—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)