Distributive Justice and Egalitarianism in Economic Problems

---

• 研討會日期 : 2012-12-11
• 時間 : 14:30
• 主講人 : Professor Biung-Ghi Ju
• 地點 : Conference Room C103
• 演講者簡介 : Biung-Ghi Ju received his Ph.D. in Economics from Rochester University in 2001. He is currently serving as Associate Professor of Economics at Seoul National University. His research field is in economic theory, social choice theory, public finance, game theory political economy and mechanism design.
• 演講摘要 : The lecture will combine three recent papers and the abstract below: 1: Voting over Tax Schemes under a Veil of Ignorance We explore the design of impartial tax schemes when agents' incomes are completely determined by their inborn talents. Building on Harsanyi's veil of ignorance, we formulate the impartial observer IO who chooses a tax scheme without knowing her own risk preferences and talents and who obeys vNM decision principles as well as Harsanyi's principle of acceptance. In the resulting framework, we show that the leveling tax is the only optimal choice for the IO. We also show that utilitarian schemes are typically rejected by the IO due to their inherent partial nature. Thus, we endorse a Rawlsian recommendation, and reject a utilitarian one, upon invoking to the veil of ignorance. 2. Fair Adjudication of Claims on Disputed Properties We explore fair (and efficient) adjudication of conflicting claims on multiple goods. Agents have preferences and claims over multiple goods, and the social endowment of each good may not be sufficient to satisfy all individual claims. We focus on special rules obtained by combining a (rights-) assignment mechanism (to assign each profile of claims individual property rights over the disputed social endowment) and Walrasian or other individually rational exchange rule. We provide axiomatic characterizations of three focal mechanisms (constrained equal award, constrained equal losses, and proportional mechanisms), using variants of fairness based on envy. 3. Priority, Solidarity and Egalitarianism Using the axioms of “priority” and “solidarity” (solidarity in the influences of the changes in population or resources on the original members) in a variable and potentially infinite population model, Moreno-Ternero and Roemer (2006) establish an axiomatic characterization of index-egalitarian rules. We show that similar characterization results can be established in a fixed and finite population model, when their solidarity is replaced with the axiom of agreement. This axiom requires that when there is a change in agents' characteristics (output functions) or total resources, all agents who remain unchanged should be influenced in the same direction: all unchanged agents get more, all get less, or all get the same amount as before. We also show that agreement can be replaced with the combination of resource monotonicity and separability and that the priority axiom can be replaced with disability monotonicity (no reduction in the amount of resources allocated to an agent after she becomes more disabled), proposed as an alternative formulation of Parfit's priority view.