Health and fairness with other-regarding preferences

Aitor Calo-Blanco ()
Additional contact information
Aitor Calo-Blanco: Universidade da Coruña

Review of Economic Design, 2020, vol. 24, issue 3, No 1, 123-141

Abstract: Abstract This paper explores how to rank social allocations when individuals have other-regarding preferences (ORPs). Unlike the few existing studies on this issue, we focus on two different private goods, only one of which generates ORPs concerns. Specifically, individuals exhibit other-regarding views about the social health state but have standard self-centered preferences over other goods, namely consumption. Our social evaluation also incorporates a fairness view that aims to reduce inequalities that originate from factors for which individuals should not be deemed responsible. By resorting to a non-resourcist approach, we derive social preferences that seek to reduce individual well-being inequalities. Such differences are assessed by means of an interpersonal comparable measure that is related to an ideal situation which involves neither externalities nor unfair inequalities. We obtain that the use of the state of perfect health as the reference value leads society to give a higher priority to those who exhibit more altruistic preferences.

Keywords: Health; Fairness; Other-regarding preferences; Social ordering function (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 D63 D71 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10058-020-00235-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:reecde:v:24:y:2020:i:3:d:10.1007_s10058-020-00235-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10058

DOI: 10.1007/s10058-020-00235-2

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Design is currently edited by Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Fuhito Kojima and Tilman Börgers

More articles in Review of Economic Design from Springer, Society for Economic Design
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().