When individuals’ utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...

This paper presents a study on the recently proposed linear inequality representation of Arrovian Social Welfare Functions (ASWFs). We first give an alternative proof of the ASWF integer linear inequality representation theorem, and then show several sufficient conditions on preference domains...

In an important contribution in 1987, Atkinson and Bourguignon proposed dominance criteria which allow us to compare income distributions for heterogeneous populations. They are defined by the unanimous preference of the dominating distribution by a set of welfare functions which satisfy some...

Many aspects of social welfare are intrinsically multidimensional. Composite indices at-tempting to reduce this complexity to a unique measure abound in many areas of economics and public policy. Comparisons based on such measures depend, sometimes critically, on how the different dimensions of...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of...

This chapter is concerned with issues arising from the construction of ethical measures of inequality and poverty. The recent literature on measurement of inequality and poverty emphasizes the close connection between social welfare functions and ethical indices of inequality and poverty. This...