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Lorenz, Pareto, Pigou: Who Scores Best? Experimental Evidence on Dominance Relations of Income Distributions

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Author Info
Traub, Stefan
Seidl, Christian
Schmidt, Ulrich

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Abstract

Using an experiment with material incentives, this paper investigates the violation of composite dominance relationships, viz. absolute Pareto dominance, Pareto rank dominance, transfer dominance, Lorenz dominance, and generalized Lorenz dominance. Moreover, we test tail independence. The experiment consists of two treatments, a self-concern mode (in which each subject expects payoffs according to her own choices), and a social-planner mode (in which subjects form their preferences without any chance of receiving payoffs when they became effective). The main focus of this paper centers on the behavioral shifts between the self-concern and the social-planner modes. We show, first, that subjects' behavior is different under the two treatments. Second, we show that there are less violations of the two Pareto dominance relations and of generalized Lorenz dominance and more violations of Lorenz dominance and of transfer dominance under the self-concern mode than under the social-planner mode. Within these groups, behavior is more similar under the self-concern mode than under the social-planner mode. Tail independence is widely rejected. --

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Paper provided by Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics in its series Economics Working Papers with number 2003,04.

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Date of creation: 2003
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Handle: RePEc:zbw:cauewp:786

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Web page: http://www.wiso.uni-kiel.de/econ/

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Related research
Keywords: Income distributions; dominance relations; tail independence;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Camacho-Cuena, Eva & Seidl, Christian, 2005. "Lorenz meets rating but misses valuation," Economics Working Papers 2005,05, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
  2. Seidl, Christian & Camacho-Cuena, Eva & Morone, Andrea, 2003. "Income Distributions versus Lotteries Happiness, Response-Mode Effects, and Preference," Economics Working Papers 2003,01, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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