The question whether a socially mobile society is conducive to subjective well-being (SWB) has rarely been investigated. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the SWB effects of intergenerational earnings mobility and equality in educational attainment at the societal level. Using...

In a model where agents have unequal skills and heterogeneous preferences about consumption goods and leisure, this paper studies how to combine linear commodity taxes and non-linear income tax. It proposes a particular social welfare function on the basis of fairness principles. It then derives...

We explore the political acceptance of taxation in commodity markets. Participants in our experiment earn incomes by trading and must collectively choose one of the 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...

Donors often rely on local intermediaries to deliver benefits to target beneficiaries. Each selected recipient observes if the intermediary under-delivers to them, so they serve as natural monitors. However, they may withhold complaints when feeling unentitled or grateful to the intermediary for...

We give a simple and concise proof that so-called generalized median stable matchings are well-defined for college admissions problems. Furthermore, we discuss the fairness properties of median stable matchings and conclude with two illustrative examples of college admissions markets, the...

In traditional school choice theory, the assignment mechanisms of students to schools suppose preferences for students and priorities for schools. In this paper, interested in the admission of students to colleges, we assume that all agents have priorities over the members of the opposite side....

Participants in dictator games often contribute significant sums to unknown beneficiaries. This has been interpreted as suggesting that participants like to be perc.eived as generous even in anonymous situations.

This paper proposes a novel explanation for the context dependency of individual choices in two-player games. Context dependency refers to the well-established phenomenon that a player, when choosing from a given opportunity set created by the other player’s strategy, chooses differently in...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we study the fair provision of health care with fresh starts. Grounded on basic ethical principles, we axiomatically derive social preferences that allow us to make welfare assessments when...

In the past quarter century, there has been a dramatic shift of focus in social choice theory, with structured sets of alternatives and restricted domains of the sort encountered in economic problems coming to the fore. This article provides an overview of some of the recent contributions to...