Welfare Comparisons Among Individuals Under Samuelson’s Model of Households

The paper investigates the relation between welfare among households and welfare among individuals. Following Samuelson’s model of the family, it is assumed that family’s members share the household income by maximizing a weighted sum of individual utility functions. While the individual population is considered as homogeneous from the point of view of social planner, individuals are treated unequally within each household. We assume a strong regularity in this unfair treatment by assigning a given weight to each type of individuals. The main result shows that the welfare ranking among households is preserved at the individual level if the utility function is increasing, concave and satisfies additional assumptions expressed in terms of the absolute inequality aversion and the absolute prudence towards inequality.