We provide an axiomatic justification to aggregate money metrics. The key axiom requires the approval of richer-to-poorer transfers that preserve the overall efficiency of the distribution. This transfer principle - together with the basic axioms of anonymity, continuity, monotonicity, and a...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

Consider the following nine rules for adjudicating conflicting claims: the proportional, constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, Talmud, Piniles’, constrained egalitarian, adjusted proportional, random arrival, and minimal overlap rules. For each pair of rules in this list, we...

We argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution’s extent of inequity (i.e., the gaps between the better-off and the worse-off), but also its extent of inefficiency (i.e., the non-realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods). We provide a...

We provide a parsimonious axiomatisation of the complete class of absolute nequality indices. Our approach uses only a weak form of decomposability and does not require a priori that the measures be differentiable.

A particular scale-invariant index of poverty is subjected to careful analysis. This leads to a new perspective, not seen before, on the family of subgroup-consistent and scale-invariant poverty indices. Parametric families of new poverty indices are presented which offer the analyst a degree of...

Many distributional conflicts are characterized by the presence of acquired rights. The basic structure of these conflicts is that of the so-called claims problem, in which an amount of money has to be divided among individuals with differing claims and the total amount available falls short of...

We propose a straightforward dominance procedure for comparing social welfare orderings (SWOs) with respect to the degree of inequality aversion they express. We consider three versions of the procedure: (i) a criterion based on the Lorenz quasi-ordering which we argue to be the ideal version,...