The tyranny puzzle in social preferences: an empirical investigation

Frank Cowell (), Marc Fleurbaey and Bertil Tungodden

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: When forming their preferences about the distribution of income, rational people may be caught between two opposite forms of “tyranny.” Giving absolute priority to the worst-off imposes a sort of tyranny on the rest of the population, but giving less than absolute priority imposes a reverse form of tyranny where the worst-off may be sacrificed for the sake of small benefits to many well-off individuals. We formally show that this intriguing dilemma is more severe than previously recognised, and we examine how people negotiate such conflicts with a questionnaire-experimental study. Our study shows that both tyrannies are rejected by a majority of the participants, which makes it problematic for them to define consistent distributive preferences on the distribution.

Keywords: social welfare; aggregation; questionnaire; income distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Social Choice and Welfare, 1, December, 2015, 45(4), pp. 765-792. ISSN: 0176-1714

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61663/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The tyranny puzzle in social preferences: an empirical investigation (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:61663

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().