Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as a generalization of the transfer principle allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum leakage of transaction costs such that a transfer still pays at the margin. Yet - to pay at the...

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of Lorenz relations in the case of dominant and single-crossing Lorenz curves. Our experimental design consists of two treatments: an income distribution treatment and a lottery treatment. Both treatments were...

Leaky-bucket transactions can be regarded as income transfers allowing for transaction costs. In its most rudimentary form, leaky-bucket transactions trace out the maximum "leakage" of transaction costs before income inequality is exacerbated, or before a welfare loss is experienced. This notion...

This paper provides a comparative experimental study of risky prospects (lotteries) and income distributions. The experimental design consisted of multi-outcome lotteries and n-dimensional income distributions arranged in the shapes of ten distributions which were judged in terms of ratings and...

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

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of composite dominance relationships, viz. absolute Pareto dominance, Pareto rank dominance, transfer dominance, Lorenz dominance, and generalized Lorenz dominance. Moreover, we test tail independence. The...

This paper uses the data gained from an income categorization experiment for five shapes of income distributions to investigate background context effects, relative deprivation, range-frequency theory to explain background context effects, individual income satisfaction versus aggregate...

This paper explores, in the context of the Atkinson inequality measure, attempts to make interpretations of orders of magnitude transparent. One suggestion is that the analogy of sharing a cake among a very small number of people provides a useful intuitive description for people who want some...

The ?prospect of upward mobility? (POUM) hypothesis formalised by Benabou and Ok (2001a) finds explicit assumptions under which some individuals that are poorer than the average optimally choose to oppose redistribution policies. The underlying intuition is that these individuals rationally...

In a novel experimental design, we study how social immobility affects the choice among distributional schemes in an experimental democracy. We design a two-period experiment in which subjects first choose a distributional scheme by majority voting (“social contract”). Then subjects engage...