Explicit economic incentives designed to increase contributions to public goods and to promote other pro-social behavior sometimes are counterproductive or less effective than would be predicted among entirely self-interested individuals. This may occur when incentives adversely affect...

We study multidimensional inequality in partitions of finite multisets with thresholds. In such a setting, a Lorenz-like preorder, a family of functions preserving such a preorder, and a counterpart of the Pigou-Dalton transfers are defined, and a version of the celebrated...

We compare alternative populations of individuals, who differ for many characteristics besides income, in terms of inequality. In order to achieve our aim, we extend the notion of Generalized Lorenz Preorder to a context of multivariate distributions with different marginals. Finally, we show,...

We introduce and characterize axiomatically a diversity criterion, capturing individual dissimilarity as `revealed' by the different best-choices that members of a society select from a set of opportunities. Diversity ordering is induced by a class of frequency-based evaluation functions, the...

We establish the multidimensional couterpart of the fundamental theorem on the inequality measurement due to Hardy, Littlewood and Polya (HLP, 1934) for the case of household with different weights

We address the problem of ranking distributions of opportunity sets in terms of poverty. In order to accomplish this task, we identify a suitable notion of `multidimensional poverty line', extend the most widely used income poverty criteria to opportunity profiles, and provide characterizations...

The domain of polyconvex sets, i.e. finite unions of convex, compact, Euclidean sets, is large enough to encompass most of the opportunity sets typically encountered in economic environments, including non-linear or even non-convex budget sets, and opportunity sets arising from production sets....

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power...

Consider an income distribution among households of the same size in which individuals, equally needy from the point of view of an ethical observer, are treated unfairly. Individuals are split into two types, the dominant and the dominated. We look for conditions under which welfare and...

We investigate the relationship between social participation and the hours worked in the market. Social participation is the component of social capital that measures individuals’ engament in groups, associations and non-governmental organizations. We provide a model of consumer choice where...