We consider optimal non-linear income tax problems when the social welfare function only depends on ranks as in Yaari (1987) and weights agree with the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Gini, S-Gini, and a class putting more emphasis on inequality in the upper part of the distribution belong to this set....

People frequently behave non-selfishly in situations where they can reduce their own payoff to help others. It is typically assumed that such pro-social behavior arises because people are motivated by a social preference. An alternative explanation is that they follow a social norm. We test with...

In particular, the government should turn way from party politics and trying to justify its redistribution policies, and make efforts to persuade the people in a prudent manner. Efforts are also needed to encourage stakeholders and experts to participate in the policymaking process to ensure...

We extend Harsanyi's (1955) utilitarianism theorem to an infinite-horizon multi-generation setting: Under some additional assumptions, the Pareto condition is equivalent to utilitarian aggregation and the utilitarian weights are unique. Our results facilitate analysis of the properties of...

Group decision-making processes are often adopted to strengthen social bonds. In this paper, I study experimentally the effects of group decision-making on social preferences towards group members, while distinguishing between participation and outcome effects. I find that participation in a...

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature on infinitely repeated games has highlighted the primary role of self-interested strategic considerations in explaining outcomes. Using indefinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma games, this paper...

Policy makers responding to COVID-19 need to know people's relative valuation of health over wealth. Loosening and tightening lockdowns moves a society along a (perceived) health-wealth trade-off and the associated changes have to accord with the public's relative valuation of health and wealth...

We investigate the interaction between friendship, social preferences, and deceptive behavior. We implement a sender- receiver game, in which senders choose from a distinct set of allocations that embodies a multi-dimensional set of potential lies. A novelty of our design is that it directly...

We study the effects of credit over the business cycle, distinguishing between expansions and contractions. We find that there is a growth and risk trade-off in the pace of credit growth over the business cycle. While rapid credit growth tends to be followed by deeper recessions, we also find...

In a simple model where agents have ordinal and interpersonally noncomparable subjective expected utility preferences over uncertain future incomes, we analyze the implications of equity, efficiency, separability, and social rationality. Our efficiency conditions are fairly weak, because there...