Previous studies have shown that egalitarianism maximizes expected social welfare in a contractarian original position with equally likely risk-averse agent tastes. The present paper characterizes agents by subsistence needs as well as by tastes, allows infinitely many possible need and taste profiles, and weakens the requirement that all possibilities be perceived as equally likely. Surplus-eg...

We propose a new class of multidimensional poverty indices. Aggregation of the different dimensions relies on individual preferences. The Pareto principle is, therefore, satisfied among the poor. The indices add up individual measures of poverty that are computed as a convex transform of the fraction of the poverty line vector to which the agent is indifferent. The axiomatic characterization of...

An unfunded social security system faces the major risk, sometimes referred to as ”political risk”, that future generations do not agree to contribute as much as expected. In order to account properly for this risk, the paper considers a political process in which the support to the system is asked from each new born generation. The analysis is conducted in an overlapping generations economy th...

In conversation, people avert their gaze from one another to achieve a number of conversational functions, including turn-taking, regulating intimacy, and indicating that cognitive effort is being put into planning an utterance. In this work, we enable virtual agents to effectively use gaze aversions to achieve these same functions in conversations with people. We extend existing social science...

We define inequality aversion as a decision-maker disliking it when his opponents’ payoffs differ from his own, diminishing sensitivity as this effect increasing less-than-proportionately as the opponents’ payoffs move further from the decision-maker’s, and a preference for Robin Hood redistributions as a preference for taking money from a high-payoff opponent and giving it to a low-payoff oppo...

The experimental literature and studies using survey data have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. Individuals are concerned about social comparisons. However, behavioral evidence in the field is rare. This paper provides an empirical analysis, testing the mo...

We use a model of self-centered inequality aversion suggested by Fehr and Schmidt (1999) to study voting on redistribution. We theoretically identify two classes of conditions when an empirically plausible amount of fairness preferences induces redistribution through referenda. We test the predictions of the adapted inequality aversion model in a simple redistribution experiment, and find that ...

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between an income tax and a commodity tax to fund a public good. We find that voters support the income-tax regime, although they would earn higher payoffs in the alternative commodity-tax regime. We discuss and evaluate empirically alternative behavioral accounts to explain voting behavior. We find that inequality aversion and efficiency concerns ma...

Other-Regarding Preferences and Performance Pay – An Experiment on Incentives and Sorting Variable pay not only creates a link between pay and performance but may also help firms in attracting the more productive employees (Lazear 1986, 2000). However, due to lack of natural data, empirical analyses of the relative importance of the selection and incentive effects of pay schemes are so far thin...

We investigate the role of framing, inequity in initial endowments and history in shaping behavior in a corrupt transaction by extending the one-shot bribery game introduced by Cameron et al. (2009) to a repeated game setting. We find that the use of loaded language significantly reduces the incidence of bribery and increases the level of punishment. Punishment of bribery leads to reduced bribe...