We present questionnaire studies concerning equity judgments based on an axiom that underlies Rawls's difference principle. Our investigation, spanning over a period of fifteen years, was run at German, Austrian and Slovenian universities. We also modified two of our basic scenarios to check for...

We report results of a survey of a representative sample of the German population in which respondents were asked for their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for either an extension of their life or an improvement in their health corresponding to a gain of one quality-adjusted life year (QALY). While one...

A small set of allocation principles is said to be behind several theories of distributive justice. However, disagreement about the appropriate relationship between these notions remains, so that compromises between principles may generate more agreement. Truncated utilitarianism is a prominent...

In our questionnaire experiment we confronted students of economics, law and medicine with distributive situations in different contexts characterised by two features inspired by medical decision problems: First, individual threshold values indicate minimal amounts needed by potential recipients...

We report results of a survey of a representative sample of the German population in which respondents were asked in various scenarios for their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a gain of one quality-adjusted life year. While one version of the survey exactly copied the setting (online survey) and...

We examine individuals’ distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven “flavors” or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavors include inequality, risk, social...

Human development is about expanding the choices human beings have to lead lives that they value and is captured by its capability sets which consist of various functioning vectors. The standard of living is then reflected in capability sets. This paper proposes some particular ways of measuring...

The theoretical background of the empirical investigations to be reported in this paper are positionalist aggregation functions which are numerically representable. More concretely, the broad Borda rule is proposed as an aggregation mechanism for the case of a complete set (profile) of so-called...