A fundamental difficulty for multidimentional poverty analysis is the identification of the poor. This paper proposes two multidimensional poverty indices: the intensive and extensive poverty, which correspond respectively to the most exclusive and inclusive definition of poverty defined according to multiple attributes. Bounds on the intensive and extensive poverty are provided. Drawing analog...

We propose a straightforward dominance procedure for comparing social welfare orderings (SWOs) with respect to the degree of inequality aversion they express. Three versions of the procedure are considered, each of which uses a different underlying criterion of inequality comparisons: (i) a concept based on the Lorenz quasi-ordering, which we argue to be the ideal version, (ii) a concept based ...

This paper analyzes the interaction of fairness concerns and social comparisons with asymmetric information and incentives within the context of a firm’s employment decision. It studies optimal, incentive-compatible employment contracts if each worker is inequity averse he suffers from being ‘worse off’ than his colleagues and has private information about his productivity. Inequity aversion is...

Household Interaction and the Labor Supply of Married Women Changing social norms, as reflected in the interactions between spouses, are hypothesized to affect the employment rates of married women. A model is built in order to estimate this effect, in which the employment of married men and women is the outcome of an internal household game. The type of the household game is exogenously determ...

This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-pres...

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...

This paper examines intertemporal risk–taking in a stochastically growing economy with externalities in human capital accumulation where agents have preferences for social status. In order to isolate the effects of status concerns on long–run expected growth, the analysis is embedded in a nonexpected utility setting, which disentangles the effects from risk aversion and intertemporal substituti...

We analyze a large stakes prisoner’s dilemma game played on a TV show. Players cooperate 40% of the time, demonstrating that social preferences are important; however, cooperation is significantly below the 50% threshold that is required for inequity aversion to sustain cooperation. Women cooperate significantly more than men, while players who have ”earned” more of the stake cooperate less. A ...

In this paper we show that for the case of two subjects the inequity-aversion utility coincides with the social-welfare utility that weights egoistic preferences, Hick optimality and maximin fairness. We also compare the generalizations of the inequity-aversion and social-welfare utilities to the case of more than two players and show that these two utilities are generalized in different ways. ...