Social inequality aversion is measured through a veil-of-ignorance experiment with Indian students. The median relative risk aversion is found to be quite high, about 3, and independent caste.

Previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons. This paper considers a two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption...

The health risk of smoking is valued using the contingent valuation method, applied to a Swedish sample of smokers. The respondents were asked to put a value on newly developed cigarettes with no associated health risks. The average additional willingness to pay for the new cigarettes is...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation and provision of a state-variable public good under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption. Each individual may compare his/her own current consumption with his/her own...

Using a contingent valuation survey, people's willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger, consistently more than two times as large, when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many...

Although conventional economic theory proposes that only the absolute levels of income and consumption matter for people's utility, there is much evidence that relative concerns are often important. This paper uses a choice experiment to measure people's perceptions of the degree to which such...

The importance of ethics and fundamental value judgments in environmental economics is high-lighted by discussing the controversial concept of existence values. The social value depends crucially on the social objective, which is not necessarily self-evident, e.g., since some individuals tend to...

People care about relative, and not only absolute, income. This paper investigates the importance of relative income within and between castes in the Indian caste system, using a choice experimental approach. The results indicate that slightly more than half of the marginal utility of income...

A choice experiment eliciting environmental values with both real and hypothetical trade-offs is set up in order to test for hypothetical bias. A larger hypothetical bias was found in a between-subject than in a within-subject design, using otherwise identical scenarios, which can explain...

This paper discusses how a benevolent policy maker should act based on some, possibly non-welfaristic,ethical principle in cases where people's preferences are not perfectly informed,consistent and fully developed with regard to all goods, including all kinds of environmental goods, as is...