An axiomatic approach to the measurement of envy

Kristof Bosmans and Emel Öztürk

Social Choice and Welfare, 2018, vol. 50, issue 2, No 3, 247-264

Abstract: Abstract We characterize a class of envy-as-inequity measures. There are three key axioms. Decomposability requires that overall envy is the sum of the envy within and between subgroups. The other two axioms deal with the two-individual setting and specify how the envy measure should react to simple changes in the individuals’ commodity bundles. The characterized class measures how much one individual envies another individual by the relative utility difference (using the envious’ utility function) between the bundle of the envied and the bundle of the envious, where the utility function that must be used to represent the ordinal preferences is the ‘ray’ utility function. The class measures overall envy by the sum of these (transformed) relative utility differences. We discuss our results in the light of previous contributions to envy measurement and multidimensional inequality measurement.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-017-1082-4 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:sochwe:v:50:y:2018:i:2:d:10.1007_s00355-017-1082-4

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

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-017-1082-4

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 ().