The design of the income transfer program for the lower incomes is a hot issue in current public policy debate. Should we stick to a generous welfare state with a sizeable basic income, but high marginal tax rates for the lower incomes and thus little incentives to work? Or, should we “make...

The design of the income transfer program for the lower incomes is a hot issue in current public policy debate. Should we stick to a generous welfare state with a sizeable basic income, but high marginal tax rates for the lower incomes and thus little incentives to work? Or should we 'make work...

Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs...

We explore the political acceptance of taxation in commodity markets. Participants in our experiment earn incomes by trading and must collectively choose one of two tax regimes to raise a given tax revenue. A "uniform tax" (UT) imposes the same tax rate on all markets and is fair in that it...

Socially responsible investment (SRI) refers to investing in companies based on financial and social performance, where the latter includes such concerns as the environment, sweatshop labor, and animal testing. This paper argues that SRI strongly resembles pro-social behaviors and social...

This paper explores the implications of fairness and reciprocity in dynamic market games. A reciprocal player responds to kind behavior of rivals with unkind actions (destructive reciprocity), while at the same time, it responds to kind behavior of rivals with kind actions (constructive...

The main conceptual framework of classical social choice places preference conflicts between agents centre-stage. This paper develops the case for a second conception of social choice where entitlements are established through the integration of different, primitive classes of claim and supports...

In recent years layoffs have increasingly become the focus of public attention. So far, however, there has been no representative study for Germany of how far and under what conditions layoffs are accepted by the population - in other words by people who are not immediately affected. Principles...

This paper proposes a model that can be implemented to estimate the willingness to pay for distributive justice. A formula is derived that allows one to recover the willingness to pay for distributive justice from the estimated coefficients of a probit regression and fiscal data. Using this...