Existence of an equilibrium of property rights

Abstract

I study the existence of an equilibrium of private property rights in social systems where individual agents decide to make individual or collective gifts according to their individual preferences on the distribution of private consumption expenditures. It is proved that the distributive core is non-empty whenever there exists, at any feasible distribution of wealth, at least one agent in local unsympathetic isolation. The equality of property rights is in the distributive core if the agents have common opinions on the acceptable orientation of wealth transfers implying that redistributive transfers, when they exist, flow down the scale of wealth.