Measuring Unfair (in) Equality

Gift Exchange and Workers’ Fairness Concerns: When Equality Is Unfair

Gift Exchange and Workers’ Fairness Concerns: When Equality Is Unfair We study how different payment modes influence the effectiveness of gift exchange as a contract enforcement device. In particular, we analyze how horizontal fairness concerns affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by contractual incompleteness. In our experiment, one principal is matched with two ag...

Foundations for measuring equality

Reciprocity and Payment Schemes: When Equality Is Unfair

Reciprocity and Payment Schemes: When Equality Is Unfair A growing literature stresses the importance of reciprocity, especially for employment relations. In this paper, we study the interaction of different payment modes with reciprocity. In particular, we analyze how equal wages affect performance and efficiency in an environment characterized by contractual incompleteness. In our experiment,...

When Equality is Unfair – Social Norms Between and Within Levels of a Hierarchy†

We analyze experimentally the role of vertical and horizontal fairness in labor relations with implicit contracts. We focus on two prominent wage schemes in firms with more than one agent: wage equality as an extreme form of wage compression and individual wage setting. We find that efforts and efficiency are significantly higher under individual wages. This is not caused by differences in mone...

Measuring relative equality of concentration between different income/wealth distributions

In a recent paper Burrell (2005a) introduced two new measures both based on the Gini mean difference for measuring the similarity of concentration of productivity between different informetric distributions. The first was derived from Dagum’s (1987) notion of relative economic affluence (REA); the second – in some ways analogous to the correlation coefficient – is a new approach giving the so-c...