IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jrp/jrpwrp/2013-041.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Revealed Notions of Distributive Justice I: Theory

Author

Listed:
  • Nicole Becker

    (TU Dortmund University and Ruhr Graduate School in Economics)

  • Kirsten Häger

    (School of Economics and Business Administration, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena)

  • Jan Heufer

    (TU Dortmund University)

Abstract

We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. "Dictator games" with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and Miller (2002) and Fisman et al. (2007) can be used to assess individuals' preferences, but - with the help of simple new axioms - also to recover some part of individuals' notion of justice. "Social planner" experiments or experiments under a "veil of ignorance" (Rawls 1971) can be used to recover larger parts of the notion of justice. The axioms also allow a simple test for the validity of such an experimental approach, which is not necessarily incentive-compatible, and to recover a greater part of an individual's preference relation in dictator experiments than before. Interpersonal comparison of the individual intensity of justice (or fairness) similar to the suggestions in Karni and Safra (2002b) are possible, and we can evaluate the intensity based on an individual's own notion of justice. The approach is kept completely non-parametric. As such, this article is in the spirit of Varian (1982) and Karni and Safra (2002a).

Suggested Citation

  • Nicole Becker & Kirsten Häger & Jan Heufer, 2013. "Revealed Notions of Distributive Justice I: Theory," Jena Economics Research Papers 2013-041, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    • Handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2013-041
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2013/wp_2013_041.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jan Heufer & Per Hjertstrand, 2015. "Homothetic Efficiency and Test Power: A Non-Parametric Approach," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 15-064/I, Tinbergen Institute.
    2. Matej Opatrny, 2018. "Extent of Irrationality of the Consumer: Combining the Critical Cost Eciency and Houtman Maks Indices," Working Papers IES 2018/11, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, revised Apr 2018.
    3. Jan (J.P.M.) Heufer & Jason Shachat & Yan Xu, 2018. "Measuring tastes for equity and aggregate wealth behind the veil of ignorance," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 18-087/I, Tinbergen Institute.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Altruism; Distributive Justice; Non- parametric Analysis; Preference De- composition; Revealed Preference; So- cial Preferences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C14 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods: General
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D11 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Theory
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism; Philanthropy; Intergenerational Transfers

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2013-041. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Markus Pasche (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jenecon.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.