Temkin (1986,1993) sets out a philosophical basis for the analysis of income inequality that provides an important alternative to the mainstream welfarist approach. We show that the Temkin principles can be characterised by a parsimonious axiomatic structure and we use this structure to derive a...

Building on previous studies on perceptions of inequality, welfare and risk we investigate the structure of individuals' rankings of uncertain prospects in terms of risk and their relationship to individual preferences. We examine three interlinked propositions that are fundamental to the...

Orderings of income distribution in terms of inequality should be closely related to orderings in terms of risk. Using a novel mult-country questgionnaire experiment we examine the basis for this claim in terms of respondents' distributional perceptions. We show that in terms of both inequality...

Using a simple axiomatic structure we characterise two classes of inequality indices - absolute and relative - that take into account “envy” in the income distribution. The concept of envy incorporated here concerns the distance of each person’s income from his or her immediately richer...

This paper aims to explore properties that guarantee that multidimensional poverty indices are sensitive to the distribution among the poor, one of the basic features of a poverty index. We introduce a generalization of the monotonicity sensitivity axiom which demands that, in the...

A measure of association is row-size invariant if it is unaffected by the mutliplication of all entries in a row of a cross-classi…cation table by a same positive number. It is class-size invariant if it is unaffected by the mutliplication of all entries in a class (i.e., a row or a column). We...