Social Mobility and the Demand for Redistribution: The POUM Hypothesis

Even people with income below average will not support high rates of redistribution, because of the prospect of upward mobility: they take into account the fact the they, or their children, may move up in the income distribution, and therefore be hurt by high tax rates. This "intuitive" hypothesis is commonly advanced as part of the explanation for why democracies, where a relatively poor majority holds the political power, do not engage in large-scale expropriation and redistribution. But does it make sense, or does it require that some of the poor overemphasize the prospects of good outcomes relative to bad ones, due either to irrationally optimistic expectations or to a form of risk-loving?INCOME DISTRIBUTION ; POLITICAL ECONOMY ; TAXATION ; SOCIAL MOBILITY

On the Evolution of Individualistic Preferences: Complete Versus Incomplete Information Scenarios.

We study the evolution of preferences via payoff monotonic dynamics in strategic environments with and without complete information. It is shown that, with complete information and subgroup matching, empirically plausible interdependent preference relations may entail the local instability of individualistic preferences (which target directly the maximization of material payoffs/fitness). The said instability may even be global if the subgroup size is large enough. In contrast, under incomplete information (unobservability of preference types), we show that independent preferences are globally stable in a large set of environments, and locally stable in essentially any standard environment, provided that the number of subgroups that form in thesociety is large. Since these results are obtained within the context of a very general model, they may be thought of as providing an evolutionary rationale for the prevalence of individualistic preferences.EVOLUTION; PREFERENCES; INCOMPLETE INFORMATION.

Revealed Group Preferences on Non-Convex Choice Problems.

This paper studies the conditions under which the basic results of the re vealed preference theory can be established on the domain of choice problems which include non-convex feasible sets, the exercice is closely related to the works of Peters and Wakker (1991) and Bossert (1994).BARGAINING;RATIONAL CHOICE

Bargaining, Independence, and the Rationality of Fair Division

We consider two person bargaining games with independent preferences, with and without bilateral incomplete information. We show that, both in the ultimatum game and in the two-stage alternating-offers game, our equilibrium predictions are fully consistent with all robust experimental regularities which falsify the standard game theoretic model: occurrence of disagreements, disadvantageous counteroffers, and outcomes that come close to the equal split of the pie.BARGAINING ; GAMES

Evolution of Interdependent Preferences in Aggregative Games

We study the evolution of preference interdependence in aggregative games which are symmetric with respect to material payoffs but asymmetric with respect to player objective functions. Specifically, some players have interdependent preferences (in the sense that they care not only about their own material payoffs but also about their payoffs relative to others) while the remainder are (material) payoff maximizers in the standard sense.PREFERENCE CHOICES

Inequality Averse Collective Choice.

The Lorenz-Pareto Optimal Frontier of a collective choice problem indentifies a (usually quite large) subset of all Pareto optimal outcomes which are not inegalitarian according to the Lorenz criterion. We study the basic properties of Lorenz-Pareto optimal choice functions and in particular obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for rationalizability and representability of such functions.COLLECTIVE CHOICE;BARGAINING

On Opportunity Inequality Measurement.

We study the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets on the basis of equality.SOCIAL JUSTICE

On the Equitability of Progressive Taxation

Income, tax policy

On the Measurement of Economic Poverty

Poverty, welfare economics, social justice

Social mobility and the demand for redistribution The POUM hypothesis

POUM - Prospect of Upward MobilitySIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:3597.9512(1955) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo