This introduces the symposium on inequality and risk.

Most prominent models of economic justice (and especially those proposed by Harsanyi and Rawls) are based on the assumption that impartiality is required for making moral decisions. However, although Harsanyi and Rawls agree on that, and furthermore agree on the fact that impartiality can be...

La recherche d'une mesure objective des inégalités, sur le modèle des mesures des grandeurs physiques est vaine : la mesure des inégalités dépend, en effet, de l'opinion des membres de la société en matière de justice distributive. Il est donc souhaitable que les opinions qui...

We reconsider the principles of diminishing transfer (introduced by Kolm [1976]) and dual diminishing transfer (introduced by Mehran [1976]). It appears that if a Rank Dependent Expected Utility (RDEU) maximizer respects the principle of diminishing (resp. dual diminishing) transfer, then he...

The (generalized) Gini indices rely on the social welfare function of a decision maker who behaves in accordance with Yaari's model, with a function f that transforms frequencies. This SWF can also be represented as the weighted sum of the welfare of all the possible coalitions in the society,...

Les mesures traditionnelles des inégalités considèrent l'aversion collective à l'égard des inégalités comme un paramètre déterminé a priori. En particulier, ce paramètre est maintenu constant lorsqu'on effectue des comparaisons internationales ou intertemporelles. Nous proposons ici...

Since the order generated by the Lorenz criterion is partial, it is a natural question to wonder how to extend this order. Most of the literature that is concerned with that question focuses on local changes in the income distribution. We follow a different approach, and define uniform...

In this paper, we provide an axiomatic characterization of social welfare functions for uncertain incomes. Our most general result is that a small number of reasonable assumptions regarding welfare orderings under uncertainty rule out pure ex ante as well as pure ex post evaluations. Any social...

The most usual procedure when facing decisions in complex settings consists in consulting experts, aggregating the information they provide, and deciding on the basis of this aggregated information. We argue that such a procedure entails a substantial loss, insofar as it precludes the...