In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations independently of individual preferences over non-consumed commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove...

This paper analyzes social situations in the context of risk. A new argument is proposed in order to defend the ex-post approach against Diamond’s (1967) famous critique of Harsanyi’s (1955) utilitarian theorem. It leads to a characterization of the criterion consisting in computing the...

This paper re-examines the welfare economics of risk. It singles out a class of criteria, the “expected equally-distributed equivalent”, as the unique class which avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches. Such criteria behave like ex-post criteria when the final statistical...

Arrow's celebrated theorem shows that the aggregation of individuals' preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individuals' preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental Pareto and non-dictatorship principles are violated. In a...

Arrow's celebrated theorem of social choice shows that the aggregation of individual preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individual preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental weak Pareto and nondictatorship principles are...

The theory of fair allocation is often favourably contrasted with the social choice theory in the search for escape routes from Arrow's impossibility theorem. Its success is commonly attributed to the fact that it is modest in its goal vis-`a-vis social choice theory, since it does not aspire...

We propose the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals' preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods....