Evaluation via Extended Orderings: Empirical Findings from West and East

The theoretical background of the empirical investigations to be reported in this paper are positionalist aggregation functions which are numerically representable. More concretely, the broad Borda rule is proposed as an aggregation mechanism for the case of a complete set (profile) of so-called individual extended orderings. The Borda rule becomes an interpersonal positional rule and it is modified to reflect considerations of equity. Such considerations are introduced by transforming the original linear weighting system such that an equity axiom well known from the social choice literature is satisfied. Students from Osnabr*ck University and from universities in the Baltic States were confronted with questionnaires that describe six 'situations', most of which reflect different aspects of needs. All situations start from the preference structure which underlies the equity axiom, viz. there is one person who is worst off under two alternatives x and y. This person is better off under x than under y whereas all the other individuals who are introduced successively are better off under y than x. Three of the points were are focusing on are: (a) What is the percentage of respondents satisfying the equity axiom? (b) How often do the students revise their initial decision when more and more people join the side of the more advantaged? (c) Are there major differences in the empirical results between West and East? We have found that Western students satisfy the equity axiom to a high degree but they are not willing to follow Rawl's unique focus on the worst of (group of) individual(s) unconditionally, i.e. independently of the number of persons involved. There are stunning differences between the results from the East and the West. Though the number of students from Osnabr*ck involved in the study is much higher than the number of students from the three Baltic States, it is fair to say that aspects of neediness and the protection of basic human rights currently aredistributive justice, Rawlsianism, equity considerations

The Shadow Economy and Morals: A Note

If the established rules are obeyed spontaneously in an economy, this increases economic efficiency since the uncertainties, monitoring costs and incentive problems induced by opportunism can be avoided. Opportunism will be increasedby increasing the incentives for unlawful behaviour, however, and a slight increase in these incentives might cause a cumulative and self-nourishing breakdown of morals. The dangers of the growing shadow economy are louring here

Evaluating competing theories via a common language of qualitative verdicts

Kuhn (The essential tension—Selected studies in scientific tradition and change, 1977) claimed that several algorithms can be defended to select the best theory based on epistemic values such as simplicity, accuracy, and fruitfulness. In a recent paper, Okasha (Mind 129(477):83–115, 2011) argued that no theory choice algorithm exists which satisfies a set of intuitively compelling conditions that Arrow (Social choice and individual values, 1963) had proposed for a consistent aggregation of individual preference orderings. In this paper, we put forward a solution to avoid this impossibility result. Based on previous work by Gaertner and Xu (Mathematical Social Sciences 63:193–196, 2012), we suggest to view the theory choice problem in a cardinal context and to use a general scoring function defined over a set of qualitative verdicts for every epistemic value. This aggregation method yields a complete and transitive ranking and the rule satisfies all Arrovian conditions appropriately reformulated within a cardinal setting. We also propose methods that capture the aggregation across different scientists

Distributional Orderings: An Approach with Seven Flavours

We examine individuals' distributional orderings in a number of contexts. This is done by using a questionnaire-experiment that is presented to respondents in any one of seven "flavours" or interpretations of the basic distributional problem. The flavours include inequality, risk, social welfare and justice. The issue of personal involvement in the distributional comparison is explicitly addressed.social welfare, inequality, justice, risk, questionnaire experiments.

Burden sharing in deficit countries: a questionnaire-experimental investigation

This paper studies the problem of burden sharing in countries that were forced to introduce severe budget cuts after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which had unleashed a financial crisis in many industrialised countries of the Western world. We do not ask how the burden was actually split in each country examined but how the burden should have been shared among different income groups of society. In order to answer this question, a questionnaire-experimental investigation was run among students from Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Our study offered the students seven different schemes of taxation amongst which we had specified a proportional rule and two progressive schemes of differing severity. A key result within our investigation is the finding that a large majority of students in all countries involved rarely opted for a proportional rule of burden sharing but picked one of the two progressive schemes instead. However, there were differences between countries with respect to the frequencies of these three rules, whereby Greece and Ireland were polar cases. The other rules received only minor support

To Be or not To Be Involved:A Questionnaire-Experimental View on Harsanyi’sUtilitarian Ethics

According to standard theory founded on Harsanyi (1953, 1955) a social welfarefunction can be appropriately based on the individual's approach to choice underuncertainty. We investigate whether people really do rank distributions according tothe same principles irrespective of whether the comparison involves money payoffs ina risky situation or the distribution of income among persons. We use a questionnaireexperiment to focus on the two different interpretations of the Harsanyi approach.There are important, systematic differences that transcend the cultural background ofrespondents.Impartial observer theorem, utilitarianism, welfare.

Wickedness in social choice

In an article from 1973, Rittel and Webber distinguished between “tame” or “benign” problems on the one hand and “wicked” problems on the other. The authors argued that wicked problems occur in nearly all public policy issues. Since different groups adhere to different value-sets, solutions can only be expressed as better or worse. By no means can they be viewed as definitive or objective. In this paper we shall consider, from this very angle, the theory of social choice which is about the aggregation of individual preferences with the aim to derive a consistent social preference. We shall show that collective choice offers wicked problems of various types which differ in their degree of severity. We shall hereby concentrate on welfare functions and voting schemes of different kinds and shall discuss these in the light of various criteria such as Arrow’s independence condition, Condorcet consistency, monotonicity, manipulability, and other properties

Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem stretching to other fields

Arrow’s impossibility result not only had a profound influence on welfare economics, but was, as this paper shows, also widely discussed in philosophy of science and in the engineering design literature

An Experimental Game of Loss Sharing

We conduct a lab-experimental study of bargaining over the distribution of monetary losses. Groups of four differently endowed participants must agree, as a group, on the contribution each participant will make to cover a financial loss imposed on the group. The study sheds light on burden sharing and what loss allocation rules groups adopt. Furthermore, we characterize a new theoretical model which contains the proportional rule and equality of losses as special cases but collides with the constrained equal awards rule. The combination of our model and the constrained equal awards rule can explain the majority of proposals made in our experiment