Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, ...

While many earlier studies have found that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, more recent experimental evidence suggests ...

A choice experiment eliciting environmental values is set up in order to test for hypothetical bias based on both within and between sample designs. A larger hypothetical bias was found in the latter case, which explains ...

Empirical evidence suggests that people’s maximum willingness to pay for having a good is often substantially lower than their minimum willingness to accept not having it, and that this discrepancy tends to be especially ...

We investigate the importance of relative income within the Indian Caste system, using a choice experiment. We find that slightly more than half of the marginal utility of income comes from some kind of relative income ...

Kaplow (1996) and others argue forcefully in favor of using the standard cost-benefit test alone, without any distributional concern, given "standard simplifying assumptions." This paper, on the contrary, ...

This paper attempts to bring some central insights from behavioural economics into the economics of climate change. In particular, it discusses (i) implications of prospect theory, the equity premium puzzle and time ...

This paper deals with tax policy responses to inequality aversion by examining the first-best Pareto-efficient marginal tax structure when people are inequality averse. In doing so, we distinguish between four different ...

A theoretical model of the ethical preferences of individuals is tested by conducting a choice experiment on safety-enhancing road investments. The relative value of a saved life is found to decrease with age, such that ...

Using a random sample of individuals in rural Bangladesh, this paper investigates people’s preferences regarding relative values of lives when it comes to different ages of the individuals being saved. By assuming that an ...