On Sufficientarianism

Abstract

We introduce a generalization of the concept of sufficientarianism, intended (but not limited) to study multiple consumption goods. We discuss three properties that uniquely pin down our family and, up to continuity requirements, endogenize the sufficientarian threshold. Two, anonymity and reinforcement, are standard. The third, sufficientarian monotonicity, generalizes classical monotonicity and requires that for any two lists of bundles in which individuals are ordered similarly by how much they receive, the worse of the two is indifferent to the new list of bundles considered by taking the componentwise minimum of the two bundles for each agent