CONTROLLING BANKERS' BONUSES: EFFICIENT REGULATION OR POLITICS OF ENVY?

Envy, Politics, and Age

In the last 5 years, the phrase "politics of envy" has appeared more than 621 times in English-language newspapers, generally in opinion essays contending that political liberalism reflects and exploits feelings of envy. Oddly, this assertion has not been tested empirically. We did so with a large adult sample (n = 357). Participants completed a Dispositional Envy Scale and questions about poli...

Pregnancy Envy and the Politics of Compensatory Masculinities

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work b...

Envy-Free and Efficient Minimal Rights: Recursive No-Envy

In economics the main efficiency criterion is that of Pareto-optimality. For problems of distributing a social endowment a central notion of fairness is no-envy (each agent should receive a bundle at least as good, according to her own preferences, as any of the other agent’s bundle). For most economies there are multiple allocations satisfying these two properties. We provide a procedure, base...

Negotiating efficient envy-free divisions

Division of a resource among multiple agents is a frequent problem in multiagent systems and fair, efficient, and decentralized allocation procedures are highly valued. A division of a resource or good is envy-free when every agent believes that its share is not less than anyone else’s share by its own estimate. As envy-free procedures are not efficient (in the sense of Pareto optimality) we ha...

Effort or Timing: The Effect of Lump-Sum Bonuses