The Public Perception and Normative Valuation of Executive Compensation: An International Comparison This paper describes individuals’ perceptions and normative valuations of executive compensation using comparable survey data for fifteen OECD member countries. An overwhelming majority of individuals (more than 90%) believes that top executives earn more than they actually deserve. However, the...

Majority voting and social evaluation functions are the main alternatives proposed in the literature for aggregatingindividual preferences. Despite these being very different, this papershows that the ranking of income distributions, symmetric under the same transformation, by S-Gini consistent social evaluation functions and majority voting coincide if and only if the inequality index under co...

We consider one-to-one matching markets in which agents can either be matched as pairs or remain single. In these so-called roommate markets agents are consumers and resources at the same time. Klaus (2010) introduced two new “population sensitivity” properties that capture the effect newcomers have on incumbent agents: competition sensitivity and resource sensitivity. On various roommate marke...

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices, ( ) , I δ π , that is at the same time ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures permit us to keep some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (1994) index while keeping the same “centrist” attitude whatever the income increase is. In doing so, we approach the intermediate inequality concept suggested by Del Río and Ruiz-Cas...

This paper explores how wealth and inequality can affect self-governed solutions to commons dilemmas by constraining group cooperation. It reports a series of experiments in the field where subjects are actual commons users. Household data about the participants’ context explain statistically the usually observed wide variation found within and across groups in similar experiments. Participants...

Our research is a variant of the third party punishment game that we call Solomon’s Game. The main feature of this game is that players can not only punish unfair people but also help those individuals who are the victims of that unfairness. The aim of this experiment is to compare the human tendency to punish unfair behavior to the desire to help victims of that unfairness, in presence of a bu...

Does individual well-being depend on the absolute level of income and consumption or is it relative to one’s aspirations? In a direct empirical test, it is found that higher income aspirations reduce people’s utility, ceteris paribus. Thereby, individual data on reported satisfaction with life are used as a proxy measure for utility, and income evaluation measures are applied as proxies for peo...

We reconsider the problem of ordering infinite utility streams. As has been established in earlier contributions, if no representability condition is imposed, there exist strongly Paretian and finitely anonymous orderings of intertemporal utility streams.We examine the possibility of adding suitably formulated versions of classical equity conditions. First, we provide a characterization of all ...

Empirical research suggests that rather than improving incentives exerting control can reduce workers’ performance by eroding motivation. The present paper shows that intention-based reciprocity can cause such motivational crowding-out if individuals differ in their propensity for reciprocity and preferences are private information. Not being controlled might then be considered to be kind, beca...

This paper is an investigation of the third-degree stochastic dominance order which has been introduced in the context of risk analysis and is now receiving an increased attention in the area of inequality measurement. After observing that this partial order fails to satisfy the von Neumann-Morgenstern property in the space of random variables, we introduce strong and local third-degree stochas...