Income distribution

This is a new area for me. The specialist is my co-author Dominique Thon from Bodø College. The issues I have been involved in are simple enough in nature. Given certain rules of what constitutes a desirable income distribution, what we would normally call taxation, what is the mathematical description of the set of all distributions better than a given one (typically the present one). We may say, for example, that one distribution is better than another one, if the latter is obtained by transferring money from the richer to the poorer in the first distribution, but such that the originally rich does not become poorer than the poor was originally. Or, for another set of rules, we may require that you move to a better distribution if you transfer money from the rich to the poor, but such that their ordering is not changed. If x is a vector of original incomes, and y the vector of new incomes, then we search for the set of matrices R such that y=xR if and only if y is preferred to x. We may also start with the set of matrices R, and then deduce the rules by which y is better than x. In our work we have gone both ways.

This has so far resulted in two papers,

Dalton transfers, inequality and altruism, Social Choice and Welfare 22(3) (2004) 447-465.

Equity in dyads; the notion of more equitable, Rationality and Society 16 (2004) 191-224.

A few abstracts are here.