The present paper aims to explore the perception of fairness in conflicting claims problems (O'Neill in Math Soc Sci 2(4):345-371, 1982). To do so, we present a questionnaire given to a large heterogeneous group of people (students, employees, retirees). Distributive justice criteria are studied...

The intersection of the standard altruism hypothesis with the quite strong evidence that bequests tend to be equal suggests that inter-vivos transfers should be strongly compensatory. Yet the available evidence is not in congruence with this implication. It has therefore been inferred that the...

This paper presents a characterization of a welfare index for the evaluation of primary goods (to be understood as those goods that all agents should enjoy equally). The welfare associated with a given distribution of n primary goods among m agents is measured as the sum of n real-valued...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population's wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price which serves as a common...

Amiel et al. (1999) use the Atkinson and the Gini social welfare functions to measure income inequality attitudes based on data from leaky-bucket experiments. Yet the experimental de-sign does not allow their subjects to perceive income inequality according to the Gini or the Atkinson inequality...

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...