Which Inequality? The Inequality of Endowments Versus the Inequality of Rewards

Ed Hopkins () and Tatiana Kornienko
Additional contact information
Ed Hopkins: http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/hopkinse/

ESE Discussion Papers from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh

Abstract: Society often allocates valuable resources - such as prestigious positions, salaries, or marriage partners - via tournament-like institutions. In such situations, inequality affects incentives to compete and hence has a direct effect on equilibrium choices and hence material outcomes. We introduce a new distinction between inequality in initial endowments (e.g. ability, inherited wealth) and inequality of what one can obtain as rewards (e.g. prestigious positions, money). We show that these two types of inequality have opposing effects on equilibrium behavior and wellbeing. Greater inequality of rewards tends to hurt most people — both the middle class and the poor, — who are forced into greater effort. In contrast, greater inequality of endowments tends to benefit the middle class. Thus, which type of inequality is considered hugely affects the correctness of our intuitions about the implications of inequality.

Keywords: inequality; endowments; rewards; relative position; ordinal rank; games; tournaments; dispersive order; star order. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D63 D62 D31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
Date: 2008-03
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ed.ac.uk/papers/HopkinsKornienko.pdf (application/pdf)

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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:edn:esedps:185

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ESE Discussion Papers from Edinburgh School of Economics, University of Edinburgh
Address: 50 George Square, EH8 9JY, Edinburgh
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Santiago Sanchez-Pages ().