This paper explores how a trust in government shared by neighbors is associated with individual preferences for income redistribution and individual perceptions regarding income tax burden. Three measures for trust in government are used: “trust in ministries and government agencies”,...

A Japanese General Social Survey is used to re-examine how voluntary giving is associated with inequality aversion, and how the relationship differs between high- and low-income groups. This paper also investigates how social capital influences that relationship. The key findings are that (1)...

This paper explores how individual preferences for income redistribution are influenced by social capital, which is measured by rates of participation in community activities. I combined individual-level data and place of residence data to examine how social capital accumulated in residential...

Suppose it is possible to make approximate interpersonal comparisons of welfare gains and losses. Thus, if w, x, y, and z are personal psychophysical states (each encoding all ethically relevant information about the physical and mental state of a person), then it sometimes possible to say,...

This paper explores how individual preferences for income redistribution are influenced by social capital, which is measured by rates of participation in community activities. Individual-level data and place of residence data were combined to examine how social capital accumulated in residential...

`Relative Utilitarianism' (RU) is a version of classical utilitarianism, where each person's utility function is rescaled to range from zero to one. As a voting system, RU is vulnerable to preference exaggeration by strategic voters. The Groves-Clarke Pivotal Mechanism elicits truthful...

The Clarke Pivotal Voting Mechanism (CPVM) elicits truthful revelation of utility functions by requiring any `pivotal' voter to pay a monetary `Clarke tax'. This neglects wealth effects and gives disproportionate power to rich voters. We propose to replace the `Clarke tax' with a lottery,...

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all...

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...