Discounted utilitarianism and the Ramsey equation prevail in the debate on the discount rate on consumption. The utility discount rate is assumed to be constant and to reflect either the uncertainty about the existence of future generations or a pure preference for the present. We question the unique status of discounted utilitarianism and discuss the implications of alternative criteria addres...

Children’s sense and reasoning about territory and land ownership may develop differently in contexts of poverty and where narratives of dispossession are a part of daily life and are of political and historical significance, as is the case in the Palestinian refugee context in Lebanon. In this study we looked at how 3and 5-year-old refugee Palestinian and American children distribute land amon...

It is difficult to ignore the increased visibility of gay men, lesbians and even bisexuals in recent years, whether it be in the media, political fora, the academy, or in different legal contexts. The recent growth in legal scholarship on law, sexuality and sexual orientation is noteworthy as are the sustained efforts by lesbians and gay men to seek redress for social inequalities through litig...

This paper reports experimental evidence from a Dictator Game experiment in which subjects choose repeatedly one out of four options involving a pair of fixed monetary prizes, one for them, one for another anonymously matched subject. In some sessions, player position (i.e. the identity of the best paid agent, constant across all options) is known in advance before subjects have to make their d...

The Pareto principle is often viewed as a mild requirement compatible with a variety of value judgements. In particular, it is generally thought that it can accommodate different views on the desirable degree of equality. We show that this is generally not true in intertemporal models where some uncertainty prevails. To do so, we formalize the concept of inequality aversion. We show that differ...

The indirect evolutionary approach integrates forward-looking evaluation of opportunities and adaptation in the light of the past. Subjective motivation determines behavior, but long-run evolutionary success of motivational types depends on objective factors only. This can justify intrinsic aversion to inequality in reward allocation games, though earlier analysis has typically been restricted ...

This paper examines how to satisfy “independence of the utilities of the dead” (Blackorby et al., 1995; Bommier and Zuber, 2008) in the class of “expected equally distributed equivalent” social orderings (Fleurbaey, 2010) and inquires into the possibility to keep some aversion to inequality in this context. It is shown that the social welfare function must either be utilitarian or take a specia...

I use data from the South African Social Giving Survey to investigate the role of social capital and motivations for giving to formal charities and beggars. Results suggest that both impure altruism and inequality aversion positively influence giving to formal charities but they have no influence on giving to beggars. The role of social capital is varied. Members of informal insurance groups ar...

We use a revealed preference approach to disentangle conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from information driven herding. We provide observations from a series of sequential decision making experiments in which subjects choose the type of information they observe before making their decision. Namely, subjects choose between observing a private (statistically informative) signal or ...