The aim of the research project "Fairness, personal responsibility and the welfare state" is to analyze how fairness considerations, in particular with respect to personal responsibility, affect the support and effectiveness of welfare policies. The European welfare states are faced with important challenges, in particular related to financial strains on the welfare system, changing migration flows and increasing inequality. Partly as a response to these challenges, there is an increasing focus on personal responsibility. The proposed research project will provide new knowledge about how the welfare states can meet these challenges and how concerns for personal responsibility can be integrated in the design of welfare schemes in a way that is perceived as fair. The research project has three main parts that all are highly relevant to the call. Part A of the research project studies how people attribute personal responsibility for outcomes and the link between views about personal responsibility and the support for redistributive welfare policies. Part B of the research project studies peoples preferences in situations where it is impossible to implement the welfare policies that are seen as most fair. In Part C of the research project we study what we refer to as reference-dependent social preferences and examine whether such preferences might shed light on cross-country differences in the support for welfare schemes. Taken together, the three parts of this research project represent a unique research agenda addressing questions that are of fundamental importance for understanding the challenges faced by the European welfare states. Four research teams from three countries; Austria, Norway and the Netherlands, will take a cross-disciplinary perspective on fairness and use an innovative combination of methods, including lab and field experiments, survey studies and collection of administrative data. The main applicant, Alexander W. Cappelen, is the director of The Choice Lab at NHH Norwegian School of Economics. Cappelen has extensive experience managing large research programs with international collaborators. The infrastructure at The Choice Lab will provide the basic support for the research project.