Nearly 100 years ago, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell warned of the social dangers of widespread envy. One view of modern society is that it is systematically developing a set of institutions -- such as social media and new forms of advertising -- that make people feel inadequate and envious of others. If so, how might that be influencing the psychological health of our citiz...

In this article, envy is identified as a drive derivative, erupting as a definable behavior in the anal phase of psychosexual development, locating envy as first being experienced during the stage of self-development, separation/individuation. The aim of envy, as identified by the nature of the investment the subject makes in envied objects, is described as "aquisitiveness," or, following Klein...

AMERICANS STAND at a dramatically divisive point in our history, separated by inequalities not seen since the Gilded Age a century ago. Although received wisdom claims that we all are middle class, polls persistently show that we split equally between identifying as working class and as middle class. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the middle folks scorn the working folks and the working folks envy t...

We show that every (random) assignment/allocation without transfers can be considered as a market outcome with personalized prices and an equal income. One can thus evaluate an assignment by investigating the prices and the induced opportunity sets. When prices are proportional across agents, the assignment is e¢ cient; when prices are common, the assignment is both e¢ cient and envy-free. More...

Directors of large corporations are sometimes compared, with considerable justice, to the supreme party council in a one-party state. Potentates of countries commonly regarded as dictatorial might look with envy on American corporate directors not only for the funds of money of which they dispose, but also for the security of their tenure.' But there are many ways in which directors are unlike ...

Envy is the unpleasant emotion that can arise when people are exposed to others with superior possessions. Common wisdom and scholarly opinion suggest that when people experience envy they may be motivated to obtain the others' superior possession. Despite the vast interpersonal, societal, and economical consequences attributed to this potential aspect of envious responding, experimental demons...

This article aims to correct the widespread imbalance in contemporary liberal thought, which makes explicit appeal to the “least advantaged” without parallel attention to the “most advantaged” as a distinct group in need of regulatory attention. Rawls’s influential theory of justice is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of this imbalance, but I show how a Rawlsian framework nonetheless provides ...

We study the envy-free allocation of indivisible goods between two players. Our novel setting includes an option to sell each good for a fraction of the minimum value any player has for the good. To rigorously quantify the efficiency gain from selling, we reason about the price of envy-freeness of allocations of sellable goods — the ratio between the maximum social welfare and the social welfar...

We study cake cutting on a graph, where agents can only evaluate their shares relative to their neighbors. This is an extension of the classical problem of fair division to incorporate the notion of social comparison from the social sciences. We say an allocation is locally envy-free if no agent envies a neighbor’s allocation, and locally proportional if each agent values its own allocation as ...

Researchers have very limited understanding of how continuous usage intention of social media (SM) are associated with online benign envy and individual-level culture. This paper addresses this gap and provides a theoretical framework to illustrate how manifestations of national cultural values at the individual level of analysis may influence SM use behaviors through online envy. We argue that...