The ethic of ‘priority’ is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of ‘welfare equality’ and the needs-blind ethic of ‘income equality’. We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resourceallocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a class of rules which equalize across individuals some index of resources and welfare. Consequently, we ...

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized because of the limitations they impose on the ...

We study top trading cycles in a two-sided matching environment (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003)) under the assumption that individuals’ preferences and objects’ priorities are drawn iid uniformly. We show that the number of individuals/objects assigned at each round follows a simple Markov chain and we explicitly derive the transition probabilities. This Markov property is used to shed light ...

Thomson (Consistent solutions to the problem of fair division when preferences are single-peaked, J. Econ. Theory 63 (1994), 219 245) proved that the uniform rule of the fair division problem, where preferences are single-peaked, is the unique rule which is bilaterally consistent, continuous, Pareto optimal, and envy-free, in a setting of an infinite number of potential agents. We show that the...

The Public Perception and Normative Valuation of Executive Compensation: An International Comparison This paper describes individuals’ perceptions and normative valuations of executive compensation using comparable survey data for fifteen OECD member countries. An overwhelming majority of individuals (more than 90%) believes that top executives earn more than they actually deserve. However, the...

People exhibit peer-induced fairness concerns when they look to their peers as a reference to evaluate their endowments. We analyze two independent ultimatum games played sequentially by a leader and two followers. With peer-induced fairness, the second follower is averse to receiving less than the first follower. Using laboratory experimental data, we estimate that peer-induced fairness betwee...

By allowing for the possibility that individuals recognize the intrinsic value of choice along with the instrumental value thereof, we suppose that individuals express extended preference orderings of the following type: Choosing an alternative x from an opportunity set A is better than choosing an alternative y from an opportunity set B. Within this framework, we identify a consequentialist an...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...

We consider one-to-one matching markets in which agents can either be matched as pairs or remain single. In these so-called roommate markets agents are consumers and resources at the same time. Klaus (2010) introduced two new “population sensitivity” properties that capture the effect newcomers have on incumbent agents: competition sensitivity and resource sensitivity. On various roommate marke...

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices, ( ) , I δ π , that is at the same time ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures permit us to keep some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (1994) index while keeping the same “centrist” attitude whatever the income increase is. In doing so, we approach the intermediate inequality concept suggested by Del Río and Ruiz-Cas...