TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND I WILL TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE

This paper aims to analyze, thanks to an experimental approach, the connection between the individuals' social preferences and the way they justify the existence of intellectual property in confronting the utilitarian and the deontological arguments. An original experimental protocol has been used to capture both the social preferences and the different justifications of the existence of intellectual property. Two main results emanate from our experimentation: 1) utilitarian subjects change their conception of social justice once the issue of intellectual property arises; 2) Rawlsian subjects are in line with the deontological conception of the intellectual property since they prioritize authors and inventors' rights as they try to reduce the resulting inequalities by, for instance, adopting a short duration for intellectual property.