Welfare Analysis with Heterogeneous Risk Preferences

S-Tier
Journal: Journal of Political Economy
Year: 2020
Volume: 128
Issue: 12
Pages: 4574 - 4613

Score contribution per author:

8.043 = (α=2.01 / 1 authors) × 4.0x S-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

How much should society be willing to pay for reducing inequality? The standard approach to this normative question relates inequality aversion to risk aversion by treating inequality as an outcome of a lottery. However, in the presence of heterogeneous risk preferences, it is unclear whose preferences should be used for evaluating this lottery. This paper derives a social welfare function as a limit of an iterative procedure, in which each iteration constructs a lottery based on the certainty equivalents from the previous iteration. The limit of this procedure can be interpreted as the equally distributed equivalent of the initial allocation.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/710561
Journal Field
General
Author Count
1
Added to Database
2026-01-25