The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi’s model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin’s, when modeled formally, recommend...

Economic concerns for equity have motivated game theorists to study envy-free mechanisms. Though not incentive compatible, these mechanisms implement in Nash equilibria efficient allocations at which no agent prefers the consumption of any other agent to their own. In experimental allocation decisions between two players, an envy-free first-price auction achieves similar efficiency and far grea...

We study equitable allocation of indivisible goods and money among agents with other-regarding preferences. First, we argue that Foley’s (1967) equity test, i.e., the requirement that no agent prefer the allocation obtained by swapping her consumption with another agent, is suitable for our environment. Then, we establish the existence of allocations passing this test for a general domain of pr...

We consider the problem of dividing a non-homogeneous onedimensional continuum whose endpoints are identified. Examples are the division of a birthday cake, the partition of a circular market, the assignment of sentry duty or medical call. We study the existence of rules satisfying various requirements of fairness (no-envy, egalitarianequivalence; and several requirements having to do with chan...

We investigate reference group formation and the impact of social comparisons on ultimatum bargaining using a laboratory experiment. Three individuals compete in a real-e¤ort task for the role of the proposer in a three-player ultimatum game. The role of the responder is randomly allocated. The third individual receives a …xed payment our treatment variable and makes no decision. The existence ...

In this paper we present an application of the auction mechanisms to the allocation of a chore (a bad) to one of the bidders belonging to a given set B. We also discuss an extension of such an application to the allocation of a set of chores among an initial set of bidders B. The paper aims at showing how the classic auction mechanism can be modified and adapted for the allocation of bads (chor...

We analyze the causes and mechanisms of inequality in Post-Soviet Union transition economies. First, we show that both economic globalisation – namely, import, export, and foreign direct investment – and institutional factors – namely, privatisation reforms, labour market liberalisation, and product market liberalisation – are strongly associated with within-country rises in inequality. However...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...

We show that an ambiguity in setting the primitives of the matching with contracts model by Hatfield and Milgrom (2005) has serious implications for the model. Of the two ways to clear the ambiguity, the first (and what we consider more “clean”) remedy renders several of the results of the paper invalid in the absence of an additional irrelevance of removed contracts condition implicitly assume...

We introduce and axiomatize a one-parameter class of individual deprivation measures. Motivated by a suggestion of Runciman, we modify Yitzhaki’s index by multiplying it by a function that is interpreted as measuring the part of deprivation generated by an agent’s observation that others in its reference group move on to a higher level of income than itself. The parameter reflects the relative ...