We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and...

In a recent paper, Thomson and Yeh [Operators for the adjudication of conflicting claims, Journal of Economic Theory 143 (2008) 177-198] introduced the concept of operators on the space of rules for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims. They focussed on three operators in order to...

We discuss the conceptual foundations of measuring (in)equity in health and health care. After an overview of the recent developments in the measurement of socio-economic inequalities and in racial disparities, we show how these partial approaches can be seen as special cases of the more general...

One must allocate a finite set of indivisible goods among two agents without monetary compensation. We impose Pareto-efficiency, anonymity, a weak notion of no-envy, a welfare lower bound based on each agent’s ranking of the sets of goods, and a monotonicity property relative to changes in...

This paper re-examines a counterintuitive corollary of utilitarianism under unequal longevities: the tendency to redistribute resources from short-lived towards long-lived agents, against any intuition of compensation. It is shown that this corollary prevails not only under time-additive...

We consider a model where agents differ in their preferences about consumption labor and health, in their (health-dependent) earning ability, and in their health disposition. We study the joint taxation of income and health expenditure, under incentive-compatibility constraints, on the basis of...

We propose a methodology to evaluate social projects from an (equality of) opportunity perspective by looking at their effect on (parts of) the distribution of outcomes conditional on morally irrelevant characteristics, taken here to be parental education level and indigenous background. The...

We explore in this paper the implications of ethical and operational principles for the evaluation of population health. We formalize those principles as axioms for social preferences over distributions of health for a given population. We single out several focal population health evaluation...

This paper focuses on the optimal allocation between health and lifestyle choices when a society is concerned about both fairness and forgiveness. Based on the idea of fresh starts, we construct a social ordering that permits us to make welfare assessments when it is acceptable to compensate...

We argue that normative indices of multidimensional inequality do not only measure a distribution’s extent of inequity (i.e., the gaps between the better-off and the worse-off), but also its extent of inefficiency (i.e., the non-realized mutually beneficial exchanges of goods). We provide a...