Utilitarians, maximinners, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often apparently compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. I argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic or...

We study how rich shareholders can use their economic power to deregulate firms that they own, thus skewing the income distribution towards themselves. Agents differ in productivity and choose how much labor to supply. High productivity agents also own shares in the productive sector and thus...

Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

In Nash equilibrium, agents are autarchic in their optimization protocol, whereas in Kantian equilibrium, they optimize in an interdependent way. Typically, researchers into the evolution of homo economicus treat preferences as being determined by selective adaptation, but hold fixed the...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agentsʼ abilities (to transform the resource into an...

Climate science indicates that climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare?

Consider the domain of economic environments E whose typical element is ξ = (U₁, U₂, Ω, ω*), where ui are Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions, Ω is a set of lotteries on a fixed finite set of alternatives, and ω ϵ Ω. A mechanism f associates to each ξ a lottery f(ξ) in Ω....

The formal theory of equality of opportunity emerged as a response – a friendly amendment – to Ronald Dworkin's (1981) characterization of resource egalitarianism, as defined by the allocation that would emerge from insurance contracts arrived at behind a thin veil of ignorance. This article...