Utilitarianism can be misplaced or ambiguous. As a prescription for individual behaviour, the injunction to seek the greatest good for the greatest number is misplaced because there remains a domain of life where, within the bounds of law and custom, one is free to act as selfishly or as...

We explore the contribution of reciprocity and other non selfish motives to the political viability of the modern welfare state. In the advanced economies, a substantial fraction of total income is regularly transferred from the better off to the less well off, with the approval of the...

This paper examines the question of achieving a societal consensus around redistributive policies. Its extent is measured by the degree of work participation among the different skill classes that populate the economy. This consensus is driven both by the material incentives and heterogeneous...

This paper presents a simple conceptual framework intended for describing individuals subjective evaluations of occupational wage inequality and their demand for redistribution. Most importantly, the framework explicitly allows for the distinction between individuals perceptions and their...

We investigate in a laboratory experiment if the experience of economic failure or success shapes people's preferences for redistribution beyond self-interest. Subjects generated a high or a low income either through a lottery or through an effort-based tournament. A sub-set of subjects could...

A large-scale economic experiment, conducted on a representative sample of the US population, shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations. Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial spectators, transferred significantly more money to an unlucky worker when two individuals...