mics, policy makers, and even politicians that poverty and inequality should no longer be treated as soft “social issues” that can safely be subordinated to more fundamental interests in maximizing total economic output. The most important sources of this newfound concern with poverty and inequality are (1) the spectacular increase in economic inequality and other forms of disadvantage in many ...

This paper examines the effect of income and wealth heterogeneity in the voluntary provision of a linear public good. We use models of inequality aversion and altruism to predict behavior in our setting. Our results are not consistent with these models, however; our experimental results suggest that less wealthy subjects give the same absolute amount (and more as a percentage of their income) a...

in this paper, two pairs of new inequalities are given, which decompose two hilbert-type inequalities.

Background High rates of violence and HIV have been documented within the South African context. Constructions of masculinity and femininity that position men as dominant and highly sexually active and women as subordinate and acquiescent have been found to contribute towards gender inequality. This inequality is in turn related to negative health consequences, specifically violence against wom...

In this commentary, we review and question Brosnan’s hypothesis that inequity aversion (IA) evolved as a domain-specific social mechanism. We then outline an alternative, domain-general, account of IA. As opposed to Brosnan’s social hypothesis, we propose that IA evolved from more general reward mechanisms. In particular, we argue reference-dependence and loss-aversion can account for the evolu...

This paper successfully decomposes risk attitude and social preference behind the veil of ignorance. Using a novel experiment wherein subjects move graphically along a slider to divide a pie of money between high and low reward in both lottery and VoI treatments, we are able to collect rich data sets at individual level. We check individual preference characteristics including consistency and h...

Globally, gender norms and power differentials profoundly affect both girls’ and boys’ sexual attitudes, practices and health. One avenue for enabling young people to reflect on traditional gender arrangements that endanger their health—and to lay the groundwork for satisfying sexual lives—is sexuality and relationships education (SRE). Unfortunately, many SRE programmes address gender norms an...

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...