Through an experiment, we investigate how the level of rationality relates to concerns for equality and efficiency. Subjects perform dictator games and a guessing game. More rational subjects are not more frequently of the selfregarding type. When performing a comparison within the same degree of rationality, self-regarding subjects show more strategic sophistication than other subjects. JEL co...

We study efficient and individually rational exchange rules for markets with heterogeneous indivisible goods that exclude the possibility that an agent benefits by bundling goods in her endowment. Even if agents’ preferences are additive, no such rule exists. JEL Classification: C71, D63, D71.

We argue that with interdependent utility functions growth can lead to a decline in total welfare of a society if the gains from growth are sufficiently unequally distributed in the presence of negative externalities, i.e., envy. JEL Code: D62, D63, D64, O00.

Utilitarianism plays a central role in economics, but there is gap between theory, where utilitarianism dominant, and applications, monetary criteria are often used. For key difficulty to define how utilities should be measured compared. Drawing on Harsanyi’s (1955) approach, we introduce new normalization of ensuring that: (i) transfer from rich population poor welfare enhancing, (ii) populati...

I conduct a survey experiment to study the relationship between people’s beliefs about size of gender wage gap and their demand for policies aimed at mitigating it. Beliefs causally affect support equal pay legislation affirmative action programs, but cannot account polarization in policy views by partisanship gender. Changes seem be driven changes discrimination labor markets fairness concerns...

We examine individuals’ distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavours” or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social welfare and justice. The issue of personal involvement in the distributional comparison is explicitly addres...

This paper investigates ethical aggregation of infinite utility streams by representable social welfare relations. We prove that the Hammond Equity postulate and other variations of it like the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle are incompatible with positive responsiveness to welfare improvements by every generation. The case of Hammond Equity for the Future is investigated too. JEL classificatio...

We give a simple and concise proof that so-called generalized median stable matchings are well-defined for college admissions problems. Furthermore, we discuss the fairness properties of median stable matchings and conclude with two illustrative examples of college admissions markets, the lattices of stable matchings, and the corresponding generalized median stable matchings. JEL classification...

We show that our general result (Withagen and Asheim [8]) on the converse of Hartwick’s rule also applies for the special case of Solow’s model with one capital good and one exhaustible resource. Hence, the criticism by Cairns and Yang [1] of our paper is unfounded. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers : D63, Q01, Q32