In the measurement of inequality, adjustments for differences across households in their demographic composition and in the price regimes they face are usually very simple. Often, nominal expenditure (or income) is adjusted with an expenditure-independent price deflator and a price-independent equivalence scale. I show that using more flexible expendituredependent price deflators and price-depe...

By generalizing the standard solution for 2-person games into n-person cases, this paper develops a new solution concept for cooperative games: the consensus value. We characterize the consensus value as the unique function that satisfies efficiency, symmetry, the quasi dummy property and additivity. By means of the transfer property, a second characterization is provided. By defining the stand...

In a model in which agents di↵er in wages and preferences over labor time–consumption bundles, we study labor income tax schemes that alleviate poverty. To avoid conflict with individual well-being, we require redistribution to take place between agents on both sides of the poverty line provided they have the same labor time. This requirement is combined with e ciency and robustness properties....

Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: An Algebraic Characterization of Projective Preorders and Some Welfare Consequences It is shown that any completely preordered topological real algebra admits a continuous utility representation which is an algebra-homomorphism (i.e., it is linear and multiplicative). As an application of this result, we provide an algebraic characterization of the projecti...

This paper analyzes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems that generalizes the Talmud rule (T) and encompasses both the constrained equal-awards rule (A) and the constrained equal-losses rule (L). The family is defined by means of a parameter θ ∈ [0, 1] that can be interpreted as a measure of the distributive power of the rule. We provide a systematic study of the structural properties of t...

We study top trading cycles in a two-sided matching environment (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (2003)) under the assumption that individuals’ preferences and objects’ priorities are drawn iid uniformly. The distributions of agents’ preferences and objects’ priorities remaining after a given round of TTC depend nontrivially on the exact history of the algorithm up to that round (and so need not be u...

Instability, proxied by individual level data on satisfaction, is measured, its association with inequality is investigated, and the socio-economic determinants of overall satisfaction are modelled. A very recent national representative household survey (2002) with a module designed to serve this purpose has been the statistics source of this study. The results point to the role of income growt...

Stochastic stability is applied to the problem of exchange. We analyze the stochastic stability of two dynamic trading processes in a simple housing market. In both models traders meet in pairs at random and exchange their houses when trade is mutually beneficial, but occasionally they make mistakes. The models differ in the probability of mistakes. When all mistakes are equally likely, the set...

A perceived advantage of cap-and-trade programs over more prescriptive environmental regulation is that enhanced compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible. However, increased compliance flexibility can also result in an inequitable distribution of pollution. We investigate these issues in the context of Southern California’s ...

This paper analyses alternative ‘regimes’ (i.e. profiles of opportunity sets for individuals) for an exchange economy, without assuming that individuals act on coherent preferences. A Strong Opportunity Criterion is proposed. This extends the requirements of McQuillin and Sugden’s (2012) Opportunity Criterion to every set of individuals in an economy. The concept of a ‘market-clearing single-pr...