This paper analyzes criteria of fair division of a set of indivisible items among people whose revealed preferences are limited to rankings of the items and for whom no side payments are allowed. The criteria include refinements of Pareto optimality and envy-freeness as well as dominance-freeness, evenness of shares, and two criteria based on equally-spaced surrogate utilities, referred to as maxsum and equimax. Maxsum maximizes a measure of aggregate utility or welfare, whereas equimax lexicographically maximizes persons' utilities from smallest to (...) largest. The paper analyzes conflicts among the criteria along with possibilities and pitfalls of achieving fair division in a variety of circumstances. (shrink)

We report the results of a questionnaire study on the fair distribution of indivisible goods. We collected data from three different subject pools, first- and second- year students majoring in economics, law students, and advanced economics students with some background knowledge of fairness theories. The purpose of this study is to assess the empirical relevance of various fairness criteria such as inequality aversion, the utilitarian principle of maximizing the sum of individual payoffs, the Rawlsian “maximin” principle of maximizing the payoff (...) of the worst-off individual, and the criterion of envy-freeness (in the sense of Foley 1967). (shrink)

A small set of allocation principles is said to be behind several theories of distributive justice. However, disagreement about the appropriate relationship between these notions remains, so that compromises between principles may generate more agreement. Truncated utilitarianism is a prominent candidate. It demands maximising total wealth subject to a floor level of individual wealth for all people. Based on some well-known distributive notions, we developed a questionnaire setting and confronted student respondents with corresponding allocation problems, where an exogenously given poverty (...) line served as a floor. However, support for allocations resulting from this specific interpretation of truncated utilitarianism remained rather low. This is surprising because the respective solution was close to an equal split of resources, and aspects of efficiency and responsibility were explicitly introduced to promote more general acceptance. We argue that people may either wish to see higher floor levels or are more inequality averse than probably expected. Moreover, high support for an unconditional consideration of the poverty line can be witnessed, even though aspects of responsibility, but not efficiency arguments, display an influence. In general, attitudes with respect to the equality–efficiency trade-off are found to remain heterogeneous, although different equality concerns are prominent. Furthermore, trade-offs are moderated by the responsibility principle. (shrink)