The tyranny puzzle in social preferences: an empirical investigation

-This is the author's version of the article: "The tyranny puzzle in social preferences: an empirical investigation", Social Choice and Welfare 2015.When forming their preferences about the distribution of income, rational people may be caught between two opposite forms of “tyranny.” Giving absolute priority to the worst-off imposes a sort of tyranny on the rest of the population, but giving less than absolute priority imposes a reverse form of tyranny where the worstoff may be sacrificed for the sake of small benefits to many well-off individuals. We formally show that this intriguing dilemma is more severe than previously recognised, and we examine howpeople negotiate such conflicts with a questionnaire-experimental study.Our study shows that both tyrannies are rejected by amajority of the participants, which makes it problematic for them to define consistent distributive preferences on the distribution