Ignorance, lotteries, and measures of economic inequality

摘要

Towards further enhancing the conceptual unification of the literature on risk and inequality, we demonstrate that a number of existing inequality indices arise naturally from a Harsanyi-inspired model of choice under risk, whereby individuals act as expected (reference-dependent) utility maximizers in the face of an income quantile lottery. Among other things, our reformulation gives rise to a novel reinterpretation of these classical indices as measures of the desirability of redistribution in society.