A tax reform is 'Dalton-improving' if it improves social welfare for all possible social-welfare functions that conform to Hugh Dalton's principle of transfers. According to this principle, there exists a prior social ranking of households and a transfer is approved if it it distributes from...

In this paper, the authors propose a method to identify commodity-tax changes that will be favored by all individuals who can agree on certain weak assumptions with regard to the social-welfare function. The method is based on an extension of the criterion of second-degree stochastic dominance...