Economics Department

Working Papers in Economics

Art
<Previous Article Next Article>

TITLE:
Fair bias

AUTHOR(S):
Uzi Segal, Boston College

DOCUMENT TYPE: Article

ABSTRACT:
This paper takes a simple, informal suggestion by Broome and another more explicit suggestion by Kamm for how to deal with asymmetric claims and shows how they can be interpreted to be consistent with two different social welfare functions: Sum-of-square-roots of individual utilities, and product of utilities. These functions are then used to analyze more complicated situations but I show that the first yields more intuitive results, and a better compromise of efficiency and justice, than the other.