The ethic of 'priority' is a compromise between the extremely compensatory ethic of 'welfare equality' and the needs-blind ethic of 'income equality.' We propose an axiom of priority, and characterize resource allocation rules that are impartial, prioritarian, and solidaristic. They comprise a...

Concede-and-divide is a well-known and widely accepted procedure to solve bankruptcy situations involving two agents. In a recent paper, Moreno-Ternero and Villar (2004) characterize it by means of a new property, called securement, that imposes a lower bound on the awards agents might obtain....

We show that, under some plausible assumptions, the gain in QALYs a screening program offers is a positive linear transformation of the program's sensitivity level. This result simplifies considerably the cost-utility analysis of mutually exclusive screening programs

The economic evaluation of health care programs can be carried out from two different perspectives: the hospital's narrow perspective and the social perspective, which includes all costs. It is well known that, depending on the perspective, the economic evaluation may lead to discrepant...

A taxation problem consists of collecting a given amount of taxes out of a population whose gross income vector is given. A tax rule R is more equitable than a rule R' when the after-tax income vector generated by R Lorenz dominates that generated by R'. In this paper, we present a one-parameter...

This paper analyzes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems that generalizes the so-called reverse Talmud rule and encompasses both the constrained equal-awards rule and the constrained equal-losses rule. The family, introduced by van den Brink et al., [Characterization of the reverse Talmud...

Economic development should be conceived of as the degree to which an economy has implemented an efficient and just distribution of economic resources. The ubiquitous measure of GDP per capita reflects a utilitarian conception of justice, where individual utility is defined as personal income,...