This paper provides unheard direct evidence that comparisons exert a significant effect onsubjective well-being. It also evaluates the relative importance of different types ofbenchmarks...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identicalindividual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric andconcave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles...

In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the perceived fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a two-period model of individual life-time utility maximization, we predict that persons with higher perceived...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by out-comes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, whereprocedures are dened independently of an outcome. To that end, wedesign procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry thesame information on other's...

The measurement of social norms plays a pivotal role in many social sciences.While economists predominantly conduct experiments, sociologistsrather employ (factorial) surveys. Both methods, however, suer from distinctweaknesses. Experiments, on the one hand, often fall short in themeasurement of...

The increases in human longevity in recent decades and the trends for early retirement have posed new challenges for policy makers, and require a holistic understanding of the processes that influence the economic resources of older people. This paper contributes to this knowledge by examining...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improvesocial welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost ofthe variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the netwelfare benefit of...

By inverting Saez (2002)’s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize theredistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal)social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time andshow great stability despite...

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design:The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concernand the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concernand umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growthrate of real per-capita income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Office ofManagement and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy...