This paper argues that health transfers from an individual at a lower rank in the health distribution to a person at a higher rank may decrease the concentration index if the former has a slightly higher income. The concentration index, being mainly focused on the socio-economic dimension of health inequality, can produce such counter-intuitive results that overlook the pure health inequality a...

This paper develops the link between poverty and inequality by focussing on a class of poverty indices (some of them well-known) which aggregate normative concerns for absolute and relative deprivation. The indices are distinguished by a parameter that captures the ethical sensitivity of poverty measurement to “exclusion” or “relative-deprivation” aversion. We also show how the indices can be r...

Becker, Murphy and Werning (2005) found that individuals about to participate in a status tournament may take fair gambles even though they are risk averse in both wealth and status. Here, this insight is matched with that of Hopkins and Kornienko (2010) that in a tournament or status competition one can consider equality either in terms of initial endowments or in terms of the status or reward...

We study behavior in a moonlighting game with unequal initial endowments. In this game, predictions for second-mover behavior based on inequality aversion are in contrast to reciprocity. We find that inequality aversion explains only few observations. The comparison to a treatment with equal endowments supports the conclusion that behavior is better captured by intuitive notions of reciprocity ...

The age at which young children show an aversion to inequitable resource distributions, especially those favoring themselves, is unclear. It is also unclear whether great apes, as humans' nearest evolutionary relatives, have an aversion to inequitable resource distributions at all. Using a common methodology across species and child ages, the current two studies found that 3- and 4-year-old chi...

Using a simple arbitrage argument, positivists claim that the interest rate provides the right basis to fix the discount rate to evaluate green investment projects. The real interest rate observed in the U.S. during the XXth century has been around 1% and 2%. On the contrary, ethicists estimate the discount rate by the marginal rate of substitution between current and future consumption. From c...

This paper explores the link between poverty and inequality through an analysis of the poverty impact of changes in income-component inequality and in between -and withingroup inequality. This can help shed light on the theoretical and empirical linkages between poverty, growth and inequality. It might also help design policies to improve both equity and welfare. The tools are illustrated using...

This paper examines how to satisfy a separability condition related to " 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). It also inquires into the possibility to keep some aversion to inequality in this context. It is shown that the social welfare functio...

Human emotions are strongly shaped by the tendency to compare the relative state of oneself to others. Although social comparison based emotions such as jealousy and schadenfreude (pleasure in the other misfortune) are important social emotions, little is known about their developmental origins. To examine if schadenfreude develops as a response to inequity aversion, we assessed the reactions o...

Inequality aversion is a key motive for punishment, with many prominent studies suggesting people use punishment to reduce or eliminate inequality. Punishment in laboratory games, however, is nearly always designed to promote equality (e.g., rejections in standard ultimatum games) and the marginal cost of punishment is typically non-trivially positive. As a consequence, individual preferences o...