Efficiency Based Measures of Inequality

How should we make value judgments about wealth inequality? Harsanyi (1953) proposes to take an individual who evaluates her well-being by expected utility and ask her to evaluate the wealth possibilities ex-ante (i.e. before she finds her place in society, i.e., under the veil of ignorance of Rawls (1971)) assuming that she will be allocated any one of the possible wealth levels with equal probability. We propose a different notion of how...