2008년 4월 23일 수요일

Axiomatic foundations for fairness-motivated preferences

Axiomatic foundations for fairness-motivated preferences
Journal Social Choice and Welfare
Publisher Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
ISSN 0176-1714 (Print) 1432-217X (Online)
Category Original Paper
DOI 10.1007/s00355-008-0296-x
Subject Collection Business and Economics
SpringerLink Date Saturday, February 09, 2008

Martin Eiliv Sandbu 1

(1) Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 3730 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
Received: 11 May 2006 Accepted: 22 January 2008 Published online: 9 February 2008

Abstract Much work in social choice theory takes individual preferences as uninvestigated inputs into aggregation functions designed to reflect considerations of fairness. Advances in experimental and behavioural economics show that fairness can also be an important motivation in the preferences of individuals themselves. A proper characterisation of how fairness concerns enter such preferences can enrich the informational basis of many social choice exercises. This paper proposes axiomatic foundations for individual fairness-motivated preferences that cover most of the models developed to rationalise observed behaviour in experiments. These models fall into two classes: Outcome-based models, which see preferences as defined only over distributive outcomes, and context-dependent models, which allow rankings over distributive outcomes to change systematically with non-outcome factors. I accommodate outcome-based and context-sensitive fairness concerns by modelling fairness-motivated preferences as a reference-dependent preference structure. I first present a set of axioms and two theorems that generate commonly used outcome-based models as special cases. I then generalise the axiomatic basis to allow for reference-dependence, and derive a simple functional form in which the weight on each person’s payoff depends on a reference vector of how much each person deserves.

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