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This paper distinguishes between income inequality and standard of living inequality. It examines the case where the utility of individuals is positively affected by a private good and a public good. We show that a wealthy individual will bear the financial burden of financing the public good, which increases the utility of the poor and reduces utility inequality. Moreover, at certain levels of inequality in income, it turns out that an individual whose share in income has decreased will not experience a reduction in utility as a result of the reduction in income. This may explain why within certain ranges of income inequality there is no attempt on the part of either the wealthy or the poor to struggle for income redistribution.

The uniqueness of phone calls and some other network instruments is precisely that communicating is achieved by the two parties only if the actual connection occurs. The sender pays an appropriate price for the call only if the communication is actually established. The voicemail service in the last decades increases the degree of communication efficiency, by increasing the percentage of successful contacts, by leaving recorded messages without further communication or by encouraging the receiver to call back the original sender. This service should be charged by telecommunication companies. The question is who should pay and how much.

This paper presents a simple static model of a world economy with two countries, two goods, and two representative agents. Initial endowments are the source of each good. Given that the endowments of the two goods across the two countries are asymmetric, the countries have an incentive to trade. Under certain conditions, it is possible that a onetime increase in a good of one country may be called an endowment shock that reduces the welfare of its trading partner. This endowment shock is the equivalent of manna from heaven.

This paper has two purposes: first, to demonstrate a utility function of consumption and leisure that leads to a backward-bending supply of labor. The second purpose is to show that in spite of the fact that a Laffer curve of any individual in a society may have one-peak point where tax revenue is at its maximum, the aggregate (macro) Laffer curve is very likely to have multi (or at least dual) peaks. This is caused by the high degree of inequality in wage distribution in most western countries.

The expanding car industry has revealed an increase in the use of robots and machines together with a decrease in labor. This phenomenon refocuses attention on the possible existence of labor as an inferior input with robots as rival technical alternatives. In our paper we suggest a specific production function that allows for inferior inputs. We verify the general conditions that have been developed in past research.

In this paper we reconsider the issue of excise tax effects on elements such as who bears the excise tax burden, tax effectiveness, and tax efficiency. Usually these issues are discussed under an implicit assumption of homogeneous populations with identical demand curves for all customers. However, most populations are not homogeneous in income and tastes, and our goal is to compare the results for homogenous populations with the parallel results of a heterogeneous population with rectangularly distributed demand curves. The results of the analysis add another dimension to the often-discussed conflict between efficiency, fairness, and equality of the tax system.