The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen’s 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from social‐psychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

The pursuit of migration is an extreme example of the severing of ties with, or a distancing from, one's friends and home. The 'failure' of migrants to assimilate cannot plausibly be attributed merely to an urge to stay close to their friends, or they might not have migrated to begin with....

To study performance incentives and reward structures, an equation based on the theory of relative deprivation is derived. The equation is applied to obtain several fundamental properties of career games and, in particular, to identify new devices for intervention that will encourage desirable...

In this paper, the author argues that mutual altruism might explain why workers and a firm move from low-productivity adversarial point(s) to high-productivity cooperative point(s). The unique critical level of such altruism is identified and hence a stopping rule is provided. The mutual...

Following Sen’s (1973) characterization of the Gini coefficient as a ratio between a measure of aggregate income‐based stress (“depression” in Sen’s terminology) and aggregate income, we transform the Gini coefficient into a social welfare function rather than having the Gini...