Inequality, new directions: full ethical foundation and consequences

Deriving comparisons and measures of inequality from full ethical foundations was a main innovation of the 1960s and pursuing it is still a most fruitful direction. This implies using “equal equivalents” and some principles particularly rich in meanings. Multidimensional inequalities can be measured and compared thanks to the “equal-equivalent manifolds”. The “equal-equivalent utility function” defines individual “welfare” cleaned of differences in sui generis individual tastes and hedonic capacities deemed irrelevant for “macrojustice”. Then, equal allocation is a deeper end-value than equal welfare but has to be complemented by free choice for freedom, Pareto efficiency and a demanded partial self-ownership. The result is the richly multi-meaning “equal-labour income equalization”.     

A Note on the Separability Principle in Economies with Single-Peaked Preferences

We consider the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among a group of agents with single-peaked preferences. A rule that has played a central role in the analysis of the problem is the so-called uniform rule. Chun (2001) proves that the uniform rule is the only rule satisfying Pareto optimality, no-envy, separability, and Ω-continuity. We obtain an alternative characterization by using a weak replication-invariance condition, called duplication-invariance, instead of Ω-continuity. Furthermore, we prove that the equal division lower bound and separability imply no-envy. Using this result, we strengthen one of Chun’s (2001) characterizations of the uniform rule by showing that the uniform rule is the only rule satisfying Pareto optimality, the equal division lower bound, separability, and either Ω-continuity or duplication-invariance.     

Index-number tests and the common-scaling social cost-of-living index

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of each individual’s expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the circular test requires the product of index values for successive price changes to be equal to the index value for the whole change. We show that both tests are satisfied if and only if the Bergson–Samuelson indirect social-welfare function is homothetic in prices, a condition which does not require individual preferences to be homothetic. If individual preferences are homothetic, however, stronger conditions on the Bergson–Samuelson indirect must be satisfied. Given these results, we ask whether the restrictions are empirically reasonable and find, in the case that individual preferences are not homothetic, that they make little difference to estimates of the index.     

Breaking silence: Some fieldwork strategies in cloistered and non-cloistered communities

This paper deals with some of the linguistic difficulties I encountered during fieldwork conducted among cloistered and non-cloistered communities of Roman Catholic nuns. I illustrate here the necessity for taking both active and passive research modes—that is, moving from observer to participant and back—in order to counteract problems related to interaction styles, lack of language, meaning inversions, and silence as a mode of communication. These problems represent a continuum—a progression from least to most problematical in terms of the connection between researcher and researched. I argue that by adopting a stance appropriate to the groups being studied—that is, by using both active and passive research strategies with equal rigor—many linguistic barriers can not only be overcome, but usedas sources of important data.     

Equal factor equivalence in economies with multiple public goods

We reconsider the problem of provision and cost-sharing of multiple public goods. The efficient equal factor equivalent allocation rule makes every agent indifferent between what he receives and the opportunity of choosing the bundle of public goods subject to the constraint of paying r times its cost, where r is set as low as possible. We show that this rule is characterized in economies with a continuum of agents by efficiency, a natural upper bound on everyone's welfare, and a property of solidarity with respect to changes in population and preferences. Received: 3 August 1995 / Accepted : 29 April 1997     

Ensuring every candidate wins under positional voting

Given a fixed set of voter preferences, different candidates may win outright given different scoring rules. We investigate how many voters are able to allow all n candidates to win for some scoring rule. We will say that these voters impose a disordering on these candidates. The minimum number of voters it takes to impose a disordering on three candidates is nine. For four candidates, six voters are necessary, for five candidates, four voters are necessary, and it takes only three voters to disorder nine candidates. In general, we prove that m voters can disorder n candidates when m and n are both greater than or equal to three, except when m = 3 and n ≤ 8, when n = 3 and m ≤ 8, and when n = 4 and m = 4 or 5.     

Money-egalitarian-equivalent and gain-maximin allocations of indivisible items with monetary compensation

Suppose that a certain quantity M of money and a finite number of indivisible items are to be distributed among n people, all of whom have equal claims on the whole. Different allocations are presented using various criteria of fairness in the special case where each player's utility function is additively separable. An allocation is “money-egalitarian-equivalent” (MEE) if each player's monetary valuation of his or her bundle is a fixed constant. We show that there is an essentially unique allocation that is MEE and Pareto-optimal; it is also envy-free. Alternatively, the “gain” of a player may be defined as the difference between how the player evaluates his bundle and an exact nth part of the whole according to his numerical evaluation of the whole. A “gain-maximin” criterion would maximize the minimum gain obtained by any player. We show that Knaster's procedure finds an allocation which is optimal under the gain-maximin criterion. That allocation is not necessarily envy-free, so we also find the envy-free allocation that is optimal under the gain-maximin criterion among all envy-free allocations. It turns out that, even though there exist allocations that are simultaneously envy-free and Pareto-optimal, this optimal allocation may fail to be Pareto-optimal, and it may also violate monotonicity criteria. Received: 30 September 1996/Accepted: 6 March 2002 The author would like to thank Professor William Thomson for a discussion on this subject; and he would like to thank the anonymous referees, who made many substantive suggestions for improving this paper – shortening it, streamlining the arguments, improving the terminology, making further ties with the literature, and improving the exposition.     

Election of vice-president and adding new members to representative bodies

 In Tanguiane (1991, 1993, 1994) we have introduced quantitative indicators of representativeness, with which we have estimated the capacity of individuals and limited groups to represent a collective preference. We have studied three forms of representation: (a) single representative (president); (b) cabinet which consists of representatives personally responsible for certain domains of competence (government); and (c) council which makes collective decisions by means by voting (parliament). In this paper we examine the appointment of president and vice-president. In our model it corresponds to the appointment of a cabinet with two members. We show that it may be impossible to make an optimal appointment successively, finding first the most representative president, and matching the vice-president afterwards. The only way which guarantees their optimal appointment, is choosing them together as a team. We prove, however, that successively chosen president and vice-president, as a cabinet with two members, have the indicators of representativeness greater than or equal to 75% of their maximal value. Besides we investigate a recursive construction of cabinets and councils by optimally adding new members one by one. We prove that the indicators of representativeness of such a recursively constructed cabinet with k members are greater or equal to (1–2^-k) ⋅ 100% of their maximal value. This estimate has the same exponent as that for the optimal cabinets, meaning that such a recursive construction provides, if not optimal, still rather good results. The recursive construction of representative councils is restricted to particular cases, so that an optimal council should be chosen simultaneously. In conclusion we discuss the applicability of the results obtained to real politics. Received: 27 December 1994/Accepted: 15 November 1995     

Unequivocal majority and Maskin-monotonicity

The unequivocal majority of a social choice rule is a number of agents such that whenever at least this many agents agree on the top alternative, then this alternative (and only this) is chosen. The smaller the unequivocal majority is, the closer it is to the standard (and accepted) majority concept. The question is how small can the unequivocal majority be and still permit the Nash-implementability of the social choice rule; i.e., its Maskin-monotonicity. We show that the smallest unequivocal majority compatible with Maskin-monotonicity is n- ë \fracn-1m û{n-\left\lfloor \frac{n-1}{m} \right\rfloor} , where n ≥ 3 is the number of agents and m ≥ 3 is the number of alternatives. This value is equal to the minimal number required for a majority to ensure the non-existence of cycles in pairwise comparisons. Our result has a twofold implication: (1) there is no Condorcet consistent social choice rule satisfying Maskin-monotonicity and (2) a social choice rule satisfies k-Condorcet consistency and Maskin-monotonicity if and only if k 3 n- ë \fracn-1m û{k\geq n-\left\lfloor \frac{n-1}{m}\right\rfloor}.     

Equality preference in the claims problem: a questionnaire study of cuts in earnings and pensions

Many distributional conflicts are characterized by the presence of acquired rights. The basic structure of these conflicts is that of the so-called claims problem, in which an amount of money has to be divided among individuals with differing claims and the total amount available falls short of the sum of the claims. We describe the results of a questionnaire in which Belgian and German students were confronted with nine claims problems. In the “Firm” version, respondents had to divide revenue among the owners of a firm who contribute to the activities of the firm in different degrees. In the “Pensions” version, they had to divide tax money among pensioners who have paid different contributions during their active career. Responses in the Pensions version are more egalitarian than in the Firm version. For both versions, the proportional rule performs very well in describing the choices of the respondents. Other prominent rules—in particular the constrained equal awards and constrained equal losses rules—fail to capture some basic intuitions. A substantial part of the respondents tend to become more progressive as the amount to be distributed decreases other things equal, and tend to become more progressive as the inequality in the distribution of claims becomes more unequal other things equal. All of these conclusions are robust with respect to the difference in home-country of the respondents.     

An informationally parsimonious impartial observer theorem

In Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem, an impartial observer determines a social ordering of the lotteries on the set of social alternatives based on a sympathetic but impartial concern for all individuals in society. This ordering is derived from a more primitive ordering on the set of all extended lotteries. An extended lottery is a lottery which determines both the observer's personal identity and the social alternative. We establish a version of Harsanyi's theorem in which the observer is only required to have preferences on the extended lotteries in which there is an equal chance of being any person in society. Received: 19 June 1996 / Accepted: 30 December 1996     

Where is the market failure? A review of OSHA’s economic analysis for its proposed ergonomics standard

conclusion OSHA justifies its proposed regulation on the basis of “market failures in employ-ment and insurance markets. However, the Administration's own analysis demonstrates that about half of the benefits of the proposed regulation accrue directly to industry. It appears that the marginal social costs and marginal private benefits of achieving OSHA's desired level of workplace safety are approximately equal, implying no need for further government intervention. Our analysis demonstrates the following points: • When the total costs and benefits of OSHA's proposed standard are com-pared across all industries, no significant market failure is evident — the benefits to industry are approximately equal to the costs — indicating that government intervention is unnecessary. The authors thank Michael Liu and Alison Pan for their excellent research assistance on this project.     

Joan Acker and Doing Comparable Worth

Joan Acker's seminal book Doing Comparable Worth, based on her first‐hand experience of implementing comparable worth for Oregon state employees, constitutes a major contribution to understanding the obstacles to achieving the goal of equal pay and is a precursor of her inequalities regimes work. For Acker the foundering of the comparable worth exercise on the rocks of management's opportunistic strategy to marginalize trade unions provided a direct experience of how gender and class inequalities are simultaneously produced and reproduced. Consequently, wage setting is always political and change to wages generates widespread resistance above and beyond issues of gender inequalities. While the feminist activists may be rightly criticized for naivety in their belief in a technical solution to gender pay inequalities, their robust critiques of pay practices is sorely missing in today's renewed acceptance of a gender‐neutral labour market, and more limited feminist interest in theories of pay.     

Aggregation of smooth preferences

Suppose p is a smooth preference profile (for a society, N) belonging to a domain P ^N . Let σ be a voting rule, and σ(p)(x) be the set of alternatives in the space, W, which is preferred to x. The equilibrium E(σ(p)) is the set {x∈W:σ(p)(x) is empty}. A sufficient condition for existence of E(σ(p)) when p is convex is that a “dual”, or generalized gradient, dσ(p)(x), is non-empty at all x. Under certain conditions the dual “field”, dσ(p), admits a “social gradient field”Γ(p). Γ is called an “aggregator” on the domain P ^N if Γ is continuous for all p in P ^N . It is shown here that the “minmax” voting rule, σ, admits an aggregator when P ^N is the set of smooth, convex preference profiles (on a compact, convex topological vector space, W) and P ^N is endowed with a C ¹-topology. An aggregator can also be constructed on a domain of smooth, non-convex preferences when W is the compact interval. The construction of an aggregator for a general political economy is also discussed. Some remarks are addressed to the relationship between these results and the Chichilnisky-Heal theorem on the non-existence of a preference aggregator when P ^N is not contractible. Received: 4 July 1995 / Accepted: 26 August 1996     

Educate or serve: the paradox of “professional service” and the image of the west in legitimacy battles of post-socialist advertising

This article investigates a puzzle in the rapidly evolving profession of advertising in post-socialist Hungary: young professionals who came of age during the shift to market-driven practices want to produce advertising that is uncompromised by clients and consumers, and to educate others about western modernity. It is their older colleagues—trained during customer-hostile socialism—who emphasize that good professionals serve their clients’ needs. These unexpected generational positions show that 1) professions are more than groups expanding their jurisdiction. They are fields structured by two conflicting demands: autonomy of expertise and dependence on clients. We can explain the puzzle by noting that actors are positioning themselves on one or the other side based on their trajectory or movement in the field relative to other actors. Old and new groups vie for power in the transforming post-socialist professional field, responding to each other’s claims and vulnerabilities, exploiting the professional field’s contradictory demands on its actors. 2) The struggle is not between those who are oriented to the west and those that are not. Rather, the west is both the means and the stake of the struggle over historical continuity and professional power. Imposing a definition of the west is almost the same as imposing a definition of the profession on the field. In this historical case, “field” appears less as a stable structure based on actors’ equipment with capital, than as dynamic relations moved forward by contestation of the field’s relevant capital.     

Bourdieu and organizational analysis

Despite some promising steps in the right direction, organizational analysis has yet to exploit fully the theoretical and empirical possibilities inherent in the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. While certain concepts associated with his thought, such as field and capital, are already widely known in the organizational literature, the specific ways in which these terms are being used provide ample evidence that the full significance of his relational mode of thought has yet to be sufficiently apprehended. Moreover, the almost complete inattention to habitus, the third of Bourdieu’s major concepts, without which the concepts of field and capital (at least as he deployed them) make no sense, further attests to the misappropriation of his ideas and to the lack of appreciation of their potential usefulness. It is our aim in this paper, by contrast, to set forth a more informed and comprehensive account of what a relational – and, in particular, a Bourdieu-inspired – agenda for organizational research might look like. Accordingly, we examine the implications of his theoretical framework for interorganizational relations, as well as for organizations themselves analyzed as fields. The primary advantage of such an approach, we argue, is the central place accorded therein to the social conditions under which inter- and intraorganizational power relations are produced, reproduced, and contested. Emirbayer and Johnson are equal co-authors of this article

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Consistency between tastes and values: A universalization approach

The object of this paper is to propose a consistency test for an individual involved in collective choice process. Collective choice processes considered in the paper are those that transform individuals ‘tastes’– which reflect the self-interested view point of the individuals – into (social) ranking of alternatives. In addition to her tastes, an individual has values about the way by which collective decision should be made. We distinguish two categories of such values. First, there are end-values that restrict the class of social rankings that the individual considers ethically acceptable. Second there are aggregation-values that specify the way by which the social ranking should depend upon the individuals tastes. The consistency test stands on an hypothetical operation of universalization of the individual tastes to everyone. Five illustrations of the potential usefulness of our approach for interpreting social choice theory and welfare economics are proposed. These illustrations deal with utilitarian aggregation in the presence of income inequality aversion, the so-called ‘ethics of responsibility’ and the aggregation of individual ranking of opportunity sets based on their freedom of choice. A discussion of the relevance of the consistency test for addressing the problem of ‘laundering’ individual preferences is also provided. Received: 25 June 1998/Accepted: 16 March 1999     

Amenities and the labor earnings function

Desirable locations are, other things equal, expected to be characterized by a mix of higher rents or lower wages. That is, if one area is more attractive than others, inmigration would occur, driving up the demand for land (hence raising rents) and increasing the supply of labor (hence lowering wages). The in-movement will continue until utility is the same across locations in equilibrium. Failing to hold constant amenities in the traditional earnings functions employed by labor economists will result, then, in omitted-variable bias if worker characteristics (years of schooling, union membership, and so on) are correlated with amenities. By way of illustration, our empirical analysis suggests that as much as 50 percent of the apparent return to unionization may be due to the impact of undesirable amenities, resulting in compensating higher wages, in areas of union strength — unionization is being credited with wage gains that properly should be attributed to climate and other (dis)amenities. Similar, though smaller, effects on other coefficients of the earnings function variables are presented.     

Top-Pair and Top-Triple Monotonicity

We say that a social choice function (SCF) satisfies Top-k Monotonicity if the following holds. Suppose the outcome of the SCF at a preference profile is one of the top k-ranked alternatives for voter i. Let the set of these k alternatives be denoted by B. Suppose that i’s preference ordering changes in such a way that the set of first k-ranked alternatives remains the set B. Then the outcome at the new profile must belong to B. This definition of monotonicity arises naturally from considerations of set “improvements” and is weaker than the axioms of strong positive association and Maskin Monotonicity. Our main results are that if there are two voters then a SCF satisfies unanimity and Top-2 or Top-pair Monotonicity if and only if it is dictatorial. If there are more than two voters, then Top-pair Monotonicity must be replaced by Top-3 Monotonicity (or Top-triple Monotonicity) for the analogous result. Our results demonstrate that connection between dictatorship and “improvement” axioms is stronger than that suggested by the Muller–Satterthwaite result (Muller and Satterthwaite in J Econ Theory 14:412–418, 1977) and the Gibbard–Sattherthwaite theorem.     

A Geometric Study of Shareholders’ Voting in Incomplete Markets: Multivariate Median and Mean Shareholder Theorems

A simple parametric general equilibrium model with S states of nature and K < S firms is considered. Since markets are incomplete, at a (financial) equilibrium shareholders typically disagree on whether to keep or not the status quo production plans. Hence each firm faces a genuine problem of social choice. The setup proposed in the present paper allows to study these problems within a classical (Downsian) spatial voting model. Given the multidimensional nature of the latter, super majority rules with rate are needed to guarantee existence of politically stable production plans. A simple geometric argument is proposed showing why a 50%-majority stable production equilibrium exists when K=S−1. When the degree of incompleteness is more severe, under more restrictive assumptions on agents’ preferences and the distribution of agents’ types, equilibria are shown to exist for rates ρ smaller than Caplin and Nalebuff (Econometrica 59: 1–23, 1991) bound of 0.64: they obtain for production plans whose span contains the ‘ideal securities’ of all K mean shareholders.Hervé Crès is a member of the GREGHEC, unité CNRS, UMR 2959.