Asymmetrical fairness in trade preferences

Fairness in Trade-I.PDF

Fairness in Trade Mathias Risse John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University February 5, 2005

Issues of Fairness in International Trade Agreements

In this paper, we first describe the characteristics of the World Trade Organization (WTO) that are the basis of the framework of the multilateral trading system. We then provide an overview of concepts of fairness in trade agreements. Thereafter, we offer a critique of the efficiency criterion in assessing multilateral trade agreements, taking issue with T.N. Srinivasan’s (2006) analysis and t...

A Theory of Fairness in Trade

Revealing Preferences for Fairness in Ultimatum Bargaining¤

The ultimatum game has been the primary tool for studying bargaining behavior in recent years. However, not enough information is gathered in the ultimatum game to get a clear picture of responders’ utility functions. We analyze a convex ultimatum game in which responders’ can “shrink” an o¤er as well as to accept or reject it. This allows us to observe enough about responders’ preferences to e...

Fairness, Risk Preferences and Independence: Impossibility Theorems

The most widely used economic models of social preferences are specified only for certain outcomes. There are two obvious methods of extending them to lotteries. If we do so by expected utility theory, so that the independence axiom is satisfied, our results imply that the resulting preferences do not exhibit ex ante fairness. If we do so by replacing certain outcomes with their expected utilit...