Fairness in Bankruptcy Situations: An Experimental Study, 2015

The pari passu principle is the most prominent principle in the law of insolvency. This study is based on a lab experiment designed to study whether people find this principle a fair solution to the bankruptcy problem. The experimental design generates situations where participants work and accumulate claims in firms, some of which subsequently go bankrupt. Third-party arbitrators were randomly assigned to determine how the liquidation value of the bankrupt firms should be distributed between claimants. The main finding was that there is a striking support for the pari passu principle of awarding claimants proportionally to their pre-insolvency claims. A random utility model that allows for the arbitrators to differ in what they consider a fair solution to the bankruptcy problem was estimates, and found that about 85 percent of the participants endorsed the proportional rule. Also a non-negligible fraction of the arbitrators followed the constrained equal losses rule, while there was almost no support in the experiment for the constrained equal awards rule or other fairness rules suggested in the normative literature. Finally, the estimated random utility model nicely captures the observed arbitrator behavior, in terms of both the overall distribution of awards and the relationship between awards and claims.

The data includes three datasets with information about: 1) decision-makers 2) production decision and outcomes 3) third-party distributions under bankruptcy.

比例平等原则（pari passu principle）是破产法中最为核心的基本原则。本研究依托实验室实验展开，旨在探究人们是否将该原则视为解决破产问题的公平方案。实验设计构建了如下场景：参与者在企业中劳作并积累求偿权，随后部分企业宣告破产。研究随机指派第三方仲裁员，负责确定破产企业的清算价值应如何在各求偿权人间进行分配。核心研究结果显示，人们对比例平等原则表现出显著的支持，即按照求偿权人在破产前的求偿比例分配破产财产。本研究构建了允许仲裁员对破产公平解决方案持有差异化认知的随机效用模型，经估计发现约85%的参与者认可比例分配规则。同时，亦有相当比例的仲裁员采用约束等损失规则（constrained equal losses rule）；但实验中几乎无人支持约束等额分配规则（constrained equal awards rule）或规范性研究文献中提出的其他公平准则。最后，经估计得到的随机效用模型能够很好地拟合观测到的仲裁员行为，无论是分配结果的整体分布，还是分配额与求偿额之间的关联关系均得到了准确刻画。
本数据集包含三个子数据集，相关信息分别涵盖：1）决策者相关信息；2）生产决策与产出结果；3）破产情境下的第三方分配方案。