Individuals' attitudes to inequality aversion are measured using survey dat
a, based on the leaky-bucket experiment, for several groups of students in
Australia and Israel. Three forms of social welfare function are estimated.
It is found that measures of inequality aversion can be obtained with some
precision and that these estimates are substantially lower than the values
typically used by those measuring inequality and examining optimal tax str
uctures. Furthermore, a welfare function based on the Gini inequality measu
re is generally found to give a better fit than forms based on constant rel
ative or constant absolute inequality aversion.