We are concerned with the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams and the possible adoption of consequentialist equity principles when using numerical evaluations of the streams. We find a virtually universal incompatibility between the Basu-Mitra approach (that advocates for social...

The conflict between the income based and nutrition based estimates of poverty is a widely debated issue in economic literature. This paper, using a two commodity framework, attempts to show that in presence of inequality, a status driven utility function can reconcile the conflict between the...

The transformation of Polish economy toward a free market system and related changes on the Polish labour market released the demand for higher education, held for decades at an artificially low level. The impressive increase in enrolment was possible because the Polish government allowed the...

The subjective well-being approach to valuation is applied to the valuation of income inequality. Results show that objective inequality is a bad in the industrialized economies but a good in the emerging economies. Too much objective inequality is a bad in both areas. Results also show that...

A cake is a metaphor for a heterogeneous, divisible good, such as land. A perfect division of cake is efficient (also called Pareto-optimal), envy-free, and equitable. We give an example of a cake in which it is impossible to divide it among three players such that these three properties are...

A cake is a metaphor for a heterogeneous, divisible good. When two players divide such a good, there is always a perfect division—one that is efficient (Pareto-optimal), envy-free, and equitable—which can be effected with a finite number of cuts under certain mild conditions; this is not...

Instrumental arguments linking inequality to sustainability often suppose a negative relationship between inequality and social cohesion, and empirical studies of inequality and social trust support the assumption. If true, then redistribution should increase levels of social cohesion and...

Water is essential for life. However, the basic problem of water resource allocation has been that water tends to be over-allocated. Demand for water exceeds the available supply. Essentially, the water economy is bankrupt. Bankruptcy problems have been almost exhaustively studied in the...

We reconstruct a dataset used by Persson and Tabellini (AER, 1994) to test the robustness of their finding that inequality reduces income growth, but only in democracies. We find that their result is highly sensitive to the use of data sources on both democracy and inequality. When we substitute...

We develop a model of social choice over lotteries, where people's psychological characteristics are mutable, their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we suppose individual preferences are described by a...