Assuming individual preferences satisfy the Von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms for expected utility we show how we can measure an individual's expected utility of any state using their willingness to accept a gamble over two reference points. The utility function captures the diminishing marginal...

This paper investigates the impact of Social Discount Rate (SDR) choice on intergenerational equity issues caused by Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) projects. Indeed, more PPPs mean more debt being accumulated for future generations leading to a fiscal deficit crisis. The paper draws on how...

Climate change is an externality since those who emit greenhouse gases do not pay the long-term negative consequences of their emissions. In view of the resulting inefficiency, it has been claimed that climate policies can be evaluated by the Pareto principle. However, climate policies lead to...

We examine utilitarian criteria for evaluating profiles of wellbeing among infinitely many individuals. Motivated by the non-existence of a natural 1-to-1 correspondence between people when alternatives have different population structures, with a different number of people in each generation,...

We provide new evidence on the extent that survey items in the Preference Survey Module and the resulting Global Preference Survey measuring social preferences - trust, altruism, positive and negative reciprocity - predict behavior in corresponding experimental games outside the original student...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Other-regarding preferences may also affect support for redistribution, but knowledge about their distribution in the broader population and how they are associated with political...

The distributional impacts of fiscal policies are instrumental in reducing inequality in countries like the Philippines, where inequality has been persistently high. This paper assesses how equitable various taxes and transfers in the Philippines are by deriving the elasticities of Atkinson and...

This study explores mechanism design with allocation-based social preferences. Agents' social preferences and private payoffs are all subject to asymmetric information. We assume quasi-linear utility and independent types. We show how the asymmetry of information about agents' social preferences...

Anti-immigrant sentiment is frequently motivated by the idea that migrants are a threat to the host country's culture (Rapoport et al., 2020). We contribute to the discussion by investigating whether migrants adapt their social preferences (SPs) to those prevalent in their host country. For...

This paper provides the tools and procedures for empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile ordinates based on income shares or quantile means....

Frequently, one person's success comes at the expense of others. We contrast such zero-sum environments in which individuals' payoffs are interdependent to those where payoffs are independent. In a laboratory experiment, we study whether the resulting inequality is perceived differently and how...

Why do people give when asked, but prefer not to be asked, and even take when possible? We introduce a novel analytical framework that allows us to express context dependence and narrow bracketing axiomatically. We then derive the utility representation of distributive preferences additionally...

This paper studies intertemporal social preferences. We introduce intertemporal dictator and ultimatum games where players decide on the timing of monetary payoffs. The setting is twodimensional rather than one-dimensional, in the sense that inequalities can arise in the time as well as in the...

We study the random assignment of indivisible objects among a set of agents with strict preferences. We show that there exists no mechanism which is unanimous, strategy-proof and envy-free. Weakening the first requirement to q-unanimity - i.e., when every agent ranks a different object at the...

We extend the literature structurally estimating social preferences by accounting for the desire to adhere to social norms. Our representative agent is strongly motivated by norms and failing to account for this causes us to overestimate how much agents care about helping those who are worse...

Using a new experimental design, we compare how subjects form beliefs in an investor-client setup under varying degrees of liability. Our results reflect the importance of social preferences when making investment decisions for others. We show that when investors have no liability, those with...

There has been an increasing interest in altruistic behaviour in the domain of losses recently. Nevertheless, there is no consensus in whether the monetary losses make individuals more generous or more selfish. Although almost all relevant studies rely on a dictator game to study altruistic...

Received migration research has it that higher relative deprivation strengthens the incentive for people to migrate, and that migration is often a risky enterprise. Relative deprivation has been seen as a push factor in migration, and the level of risk involved in migration has been understood...

We experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second...

We conduct an interdisciplinary meta-analysis to aggregate the knowledge from empirical estimates of inequality aversion reported from 1999 to 2022. In particular, we examine 85 estimates of disadvantageous inequality aversion (or envy) and advantageous inequality aversion (or guilt) from 26...

We consider the problem of allocating a single object to the agents with payments. Agents have preferences that are not necessarily quasi-linear. We characterize the class of rules satisfying pairwise strategy-proofness and non-imposition by the priority rule. Our characterization result remains...

We experimentally examine how the incentive to defect in a social dilemma affects conditional cooperation. In our first study we conduct online experiments in which subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with payoffs systematically varied across games. We find that few second...

We report the results of an online experiment studying preferences for giving and preferences for group-wide redistribution in small (4-person) and large (200-person) groups. We find that the desire to engage in voluntary giving decreases significantly with group size. However, voting for...