How does procedural justice shape the desirability of markets?

Past studies of markets show that people oppose the use of markets as allocation procedures when they believe that markets produce distributively unfair or immoral outcomes. This study tests the hypothesis that people also make distinct procedural justice judgments about markets which independently shape their rating of the desirability of using markets. The results indicate that people do make distinct procedural justice judgments and that those judgments are important in shaping their evaluations of market desirability. Further, procedural justice judgments are equally influential in shaping evaluations of market and nonmarket allocation procedures. In contrast to findings linking desirability to issues of distributive fairness or morality, which suggest the desirability of identifying spheres of justice within which markets are acceptable, these findings indicate the importance of designing markets so that they have features that people associate with fair procedures.