Friedman, Harsanyi, Rawls, Boulding – or somebody else? An experimental investigation of distributive justice

This paper investigates distributive justice using a fourfold experimental design: The ignorance and the risk scenarios are combined with the self-concern and the umpire modes. We study behavioral switches between self-concern and umpire mode and investigate the goodness of ten standards of behavior. In the ignorance scenario, subjects became, on average, less inequality-averse as umpires. A within-subjects analysis shows that about one half became less inequality-averse, one quarter became more inequality-averse and one quarter remained unchanged as umpires. In the risk scenario, subjects became on average more inequality-averse in their umpire roles. A within-subjects analysis shows that about half became more inequality-averse, one quarter became less inequality-averse, and one quarter remained unchanged as umpires. As to the standards of behavior, several prominent ones (leximin, leximax, Gini, Cobb-Douglas) were not supported, while expected utility, Boulding’s hypothesis, the entropy social welfare function, and randomization preference enjoyed impressive acceptance. For the risk scenario, the tax standard of behavior joins the favorite standards of behavior.Financial Support of the European Commission under TMR Contract No. ERBFMRXCT98-0248 is gratefully acknowledged. We are indebted to Serge-Christophe Kolm, Alf Erling Risa, Peter Zweifel, two anonymous referees and an editor of Social Choice and Welfare for helpful comments. We thank Marc Paolella for improving our English writing style. The usual disclaimer applies. The experimental data can be obtained from the authors (e-mail: traub@bwl.uni-kiel.de).     

Impression management in the market for residential care for children and youth in Sweden

In what has become quite a turbulent quasi‐market for residential care for children and youth, providers now compete for public contracts. To create visibility and attract customers, many providers use marketing activities to project the desired impression of themselves to maintain or strengthen their market position. In this article, we analyse how companies that provide residential care for children manage the impressions they project on their websites and in advertisements. The results reveal that residential care providers use a range of impression management strategies to enhance their organizational image and to respond to potentially damaging or threatening images. The information providers choose to disclose leaves customers—in this case, the social workers responsible for choosing and purchasing care on behalf of clients—with rather limited opportunities to evaluate the quality of care. This is a significant problem considering other, more reliable, sources of information are difficult to access.     

The Effect of Income on General Life Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction

Increasing evidence from the empirical economic and psychological literature suggests that positive and negative well-being are more than opposite ends of the same phenomenon. Two separate measures of the dependent variable may therefore be needed when analyzing the determinants of subjective well-being. We investigate asymmetries in the effect of income on subjective well-being with a single-item measure of general life satisfaction. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984–2004, and a flexible multiple-index ordered probit panel data model with varying thresholds, we find that income has only a minor effect on high satisfaction but significantly reduces dissatisfaction.     

Individual fairness in Harsanyi’s utilitarianism: operationalizing all-inclusive utility

Fairness can be incorporated into Harsanyi’s utilitarianism through all-inclusive utility. This retains the normative assumptions of expected utility and Pareto-efficiency, and relates fairness to individual preferences. It makes utilitarianism unfalsifiable, however, if agents’ all-inclusive utilities are not explicitly specified. This note proposes a two-stage model to make utilitarian welfare analysis falsifiable by specifying all-inclusive utilities explicitly through models of individual fairness preferences. The approach is applied to include fairness in widely discussed allocation examples.     

Mutual Tuning of Multiple Trajectories

In this article, I offer a pragmatist conceptual framework to link the sociology of health and illness with the sociology of science and technology. Starting from an examination of the practice of doing medicine and science, I extend Anselm Strauss's trajectory concept to analyze the temporality and processual character of an evolving phenomenon in two important ways. First, I analyze how a single trajectory emerges out of the interaction of multiple trajectories and how emerging and existing trajectories shape each other with differential power. Second, in accord with recent writings in science and technology studies, agency is extended from humans to non-humans. I discuss different origin and ending strategies of trajectories and the management of trajectories over time.     

环境税改革与绿色增长:欧洲视角

欧洲的环境税改革可以追溯到20世纪90年代初,但自2001年起却经历了一个持续的发展低谷阶段,而最近,日益严厉的碳减排目标和众多欧洲政府通过税收来减少公共赤字的需要相结合,正在促成人们对碳/能源税和环境税改革兴趣的再度提升。本文的基本观点是,环境税改革是一种促进绿色增长的政策,也就是带来在欧洲和其他地方的环境可持续的经济增长,而欧洲范围内的环境税改革是欧盟实现2020年减排目标十分有效而经济的手段,尤其是在全球性气候合作的背景下。此外,它还可以用来提高一般意义上的资源利用效率。环境税改革是欧洲应对全球气候变化的一个巨大政策机遇,它不仅代价较低,而且有助于就业、技术革新和可以长期经济发展的新工业,而这些都是来自公共政策的巨大收益。因而,环境税改革理应成为实现温室气体大幅度削减目标的政策工具组合中的重要组成部分。当然,这有赖于欧盟政治家和决策者找到应对环境税改革可能引致的诸多政治挑战的方法,从而代表欧洲实现这一改革的预期收益。     

MONITORING IN TEAMS: USING LABORATORY EXPERIMENTS TO STUDY A THEORY OF THE FIRM

Alchian and Demsetz’s influential explanation of the classical business firm (The American Economic Review, 1972, 62, 777–795) argues that there is need for a concentrated residual claim in the hands of a central agent, to motivate the monitoring of workers. We model monitoring as a way to transform team production from a collective action dilemma with strong free riding incentives to a productivity‐enhancing opportunity with strong private marginal incentives to contribute effort. In an experiment, we have subjects experience team production without monitoring, team production with a central monitor, and team production with peer monitoring. Then subjects vote on whether to employ the central monitor, who gets to keep a fixed share of the team output, or to rely on peer monitoring, which entails a coordination or free riding problem. Our subjects usually prefer peer monitoring but they switch to the specialist when unable to successfully self‐monitor. We provide evidence for situations in which team members resist the appointing of a central monitor and succeed in overcoming coordination and free riding problems as well as for a situation in which an Alchian–Demsetz‐like firm grows in the laboratory.