Journal ArticleDOI
Choices of Principles of Distributive Justice in Experimental Groups
TLDR
In this article, experimental methods involving imperfect information are used to generate group choices of principles of distributive justice, and the results indicate that individuals reach consensus, strongly reject the minimax principle, and largely choose what Rawls has called an "intuitionistic" principle.Abstract:
Experimental methods involving imperfect information are used to generate group choices of principles of distributive justice. Conditions approximating John Rawls's "original position" in A Theory of Justice serve as the starting point, and his conjectures are contrasted with those of John Harsanyi. Three "predictions" implicit in the Rawlsian argument are tested: (1) individuals choosing a principle of economic distribution would be able to reach unanimous agreement; (2) they would always choose the same principle; and (3) they would always choose to maximize the welfare of the worst-off individual. Our results indicate that individuals reach consensus, strongly reject the minimax principle, and largely choose what Rawls has called an "intuitionistic" principle. Overwhelmingly, the chosen principle is maximizing the average income with a floor constraint: a principle which is a compromise between those proposed by Rawls and Harsanyi. It takes into account not only the position of the worst-off individual but also the potential expected gain for the rest of society.read more
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Equality of Opportunity
TL;DR: The modern formulation of equality of opportunity emerges from discussions in political philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century beginning with Rawls (1971) and Dworkin, 1981a, DworkIN, 1981b,.
Posted Content
Equality of Opportunity
TL;DR: The Handbook of Income Distribution as mentioned in this paper summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity and provides evidence of population views from surveys and experiments concerning conceptions of equality, summarizing the empirical literature on inequality of opportunity to date.
Journal ArticleDOI
Coping with tragedies of the commons
TL;DR: The complexity of using rules as tools to change the structure of commons dilemmas is discussed, drawing on extensive research on rules in field settings, and it is shown that these assumptions are a poor foundation for policy analysis.
Book ChapterDOI
Equality of Opportunity
TL;DR: The authors explored the concept of equality of opportunity, particularly as it has been frequently used in the sociology of education, and used it as an explanatory concept when discussing class differences in access to privileged educational institutions.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enforcement of Contribution Norms in Public Good Games with Heterogeneous Populations
TL;DR: This work investigates experimentally the emergence and informal enforcement of different contribution norms to a public good in homogeneous and different heterogeneous groups and shows econometrically that these differences are not accidentally but enforced by punishment.
References
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Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
TL;DR: Theory of games and economic behavior as mentioned in this paper is the classic work upon which modern-day game theory is based, and it has been widely used to analyze a host of real-world phenomena from arms races to optimal policy choices of presidential candidates, from vaccination policy to major league baseball salary negotiations.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice
Amos Tversky,Daniel Kahneman +1 more
TL;DR: The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways.
Book
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
TL;DR: In Anarchy, State, and Utopia as discussed by the authors, Nozick argues that the state is justified only when it is severely limited to the narrow function of protection against force, theft and fraud and to the enforcement of contracts.
Book ChapterDOI
Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility
TL;DR: The naive concept of social welfare as a sum of intuitively measurable and comparable individual cardinal utilities has been found unable to withstand the methodological criticism of the Pareto school as mentioned in this paper and Professor Bergson has therefore recommended its replacement by the more general concept of a social welfare function, defined as an arbitrary mathematical function of economic (and other social) variables, of a form freely chosen according to one's personal ethical (or political) value judgments.