This forthcoming chapter in the Handbook of Income Distribution (eds., A. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon) summarizes the literature on equality of opportunity. We begin by reviewing the philosophical debate concerning equality since Rawls (sections 1 and 2), present economic algorithms for...

What are the long-term effects of policies intended to equalize opportunities among different social classes of children? To find out, we study the stationary states of an intergenerational model where adults are either White or Blue collar employees. Both adults and the state invest in their...

The justification of using GNP per capita as a measure of economic development is utilitarian ethics plus an assumption that no needs are more urgent than others. Here, we advocate a measure of economic development based on the degree to which the society in question has equalized opportunities...

We consider abstract exchange mechanisms wherein individuals submit "diversified" offers in m commodities, which are then redistributed to them. Our first result is that if the mechanism satisfies certain natural conditions embodying "fairness" and "convenience" then it admits unique prices, in...

We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity i for commodity j, for certain ordered pairs ij. Given any connected graph G of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism M_G that satisfies some natural conditions of "fairness" and "convenience."...

We show that any transferable utility game can be represented by an assignment of facilities to players, in which it is intuitively obvious how to allocate the total cost of the facilities. The intuitive solution in the representation turns out to be the Shapley value of the game, and thus...

Consider agents who undertake costly effort to produce stochastic outputs observable by a principal. The principal can award a prize deterministically to the agent with the highest output, or to all of them with probabilities that are proportional to their outputs. We show that, if there is...

Whether or not to vaccinate one’s child is a decision that a parent may approach in several ways. The vaccination game, in which parents must choose whether to vaccinate a child against a disease, is one with positive externalities (herd immunity). In some societies, not vaccinating is an...

We analyze the long-term workforce composition when the quality of mentoring available to majority and minority juniors depends on their representation in the workforce. A workforce with ≥50% majority workers invariably converges to one where the majority is overrepresented relative to the...