The tyranny puzzle in social preferences: an empirical investigation

Frank Cowell (), Marc Fleurbaey and Bertil Tungodden

Social Choice and Welfare, 2015, vol. 45, issue 4, 765-792

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. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Keywords: H20; H21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1007/s00355-015-0880-9

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