中文摘要
社会应为减少不平等支付多少? 针对这一规范性问题, 标准做法将不平等视为彩票的结果, 从而把不平等厌恶与风险厌恶联系起来。然而, 在存在异质性风险偏好的情况下, 尚不清楚应采用谁的偏好来评估这张彩票。本文将社会福利函数推导为某一迭代过程的极限, 其中每一轮迭代都基于上一轮迭代得到的确定性等价构造一张彩票。该过程的极限可以解释为初始分配的均等分配等价。
Abstract
How much should society be willing to pay for reducing inequality? The standard approach to this normative question relates inequality aversion to risk aversion by treating inequality as an outcome of a lottery. However, in the presence of heterogeneous risk preferences, it is unclear whose preferences should be used for evaluating this lottery. This paper derives a social welfare function as a limit of an iterative procedure, in which each iteration constructs a lottery based on the certainty equivalents from the previous iteration. The limit of this procedure can be interpreted as the equally distributed equivalent of the initial allocation.