Responsibility and redistribution: The case of first best taxation

Bertil Tungodden

Social Choice and Welfare, 2005, vol. 24, issue 1, 33-44

Abstract: It is not straightforward to define the ethics of responsibility in cases where the consequences of changes in factors within our control are partly determined by factors beyond our control. In this paper, we suggest that one plausible view is to keep us responsible for the parts of the consequences that are independent of the factors beyond our control. Within the framework of a first best taxation problem, we present and characterise a redistributive mechanism that both satisfies this interpretation of the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of compensation within a broad class of economic environments. However, on a general basis, even this weaker version of the ethics of responsibility is not compatible with the ethics of compensation, and we report an impossibility result that clarifies the source of this conflict. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2005

Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-003-0267-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Responsibility and Redistribution: The Case of First Best Taxation (2001)
Working Paper: Responsibility and Redistribution: the Case of First Best Taxation (2000)
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:sochwe:v:24:y:2005:i:1:p:33-44

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0267-1

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().