All probabilities are equal, but some probabilities are more equal than others

There are several procedures for selecting people at random. Modern and ancient stories as well as some experiments suggest that individuals may not view all such lotteries as “fair.” In this paper, we compare alternative procedures and show conditions under which some procedures are preferred to others. These procedures give all individuals an equal chance of being selected, but have different structures. We analyze these procedures as multi-stage lotteries. In line with previous literature, our analysis is based on the observation that multi-stage lotteries are not considered indifferent to their probabilistic one-stage representations.