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The wage-productivity cycles of commercial airline pilots and intercity bus drivers lends credibility to the argument that workers may prefer upwardly sloping wage profiles in order to meet rising consumption standards. Four traditional explanations for wages rising faster than productivity, firm-specific human capital, bonding contracts, risk aversion, and adverse selection, fail to apply in at least these two occupational cases. A survey indicated a preference for a rising wage profile over an equal but steady profile.

Both economic regulation in market economies and state ownership and control of the means of production in socialist economies have been interpreted as means of protecting people from economic exploitation by the owners of capital. In this paper, I argue against this interpretation, suggesting that both sets of institutions are more plausibly viewed as protecting people from destructive competition amongst themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-m dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with the results of an agent-based computer model, which assumes that success depends jointly on the intrinsic talent of the agent and on unpredictable luck. We find a small, but non-zero contribution of random luck to the performance of the best sprinters, which may serve as a lower bound for the randomness role in other, less stringently controlled competitive domains. Additionally we discuss the perception of the payoff differences among the top participants, and the role of random luck in the resulting inequality. • Inequalities play an enormous role in societies. • Their perception depends on whether they are deserved or not. • Even in sports, random chance influences the effects of talent and hard training. • The use of an Agent Based Model allows a new way to estimate this role. • Chance is non-negligible even in the most controlled disciplines (100 m dash). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]