I study the egalitarian way of distributing resources across generations. Distributional equity deeply conflicts with the Pareto principle: efficient allocations cannot guarantee that i) each generation be assigned a consumption bundle that is at least as large as an arbitrarily small fraction...

This paper investigates ethical aggregation of infinite utility streams by representable social welfare relations. We prove that the Hammond Equity postulate and other variations of it like the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle are incompatible with positive responsiveness to welfare...

How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the "veil of ignorance" of...

We are interested in the comparisons of standard-of-living across societies when observations of both income and household structure are available. We generalise the approach of A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon (1987) [3] to the case where the marginal distributions of needs can vary across the...

We provide an axiomatization of expected equally-distributed equivalent-utility social welfare functions in the context of Harsanyiʼs impartial observer theorem. For this family of social welfare functions, we show what additional axiom is necessary and sufficient for the observer to exhibit...

We provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes, one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non-transferable. The result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard...