We consider a society which is jointly committed to the principle of equal opportunity and to increasing aggregate wealth. However, the society faces the vestiges of past discrimination in the form of a historically skewed distribution of social resources. We consider the problem of allocating...

We examine the interactions between individual behavior, sentiments and the social contract in a model of rational voting over redistribution. Agents have moral "work values". Individuals' self-esteem and social consideration of others are endogenously determined comparing behaviors to moral...

Hurwicz and Otani and Sicilian characterized the Nash equilibrium allocations of the Walrasian demand manipulation game in successively more general exchange environments. In this paper, we extend the analysis to production economies with short-selling. First, we generalize Hurwicz's and Otani...

I provide three very simple examples to demonstrate the point that the result by Bossert and Fleurbaey concerning the general impossibility of achieving equal opportunities is largely due to their particular framework and is not necessarily robust to consideration of alternative means of...

In this paper, I develop a positive model in which altruistic agents vote over quadratic (progressive) income tax schedules. The agents have heterogeneous preferences and productivities, and the model incorporates the incentive effects of taxation. The main result of the paper is that, under...

In this paper we present a model of rational voting over redistribution where individual self-esteem and relative esteem for others are endogenously determined. Individuals differ in their productivities, and their behaviour and political views are influenced by moral standards concerning work....

We introduce a model in which agents' sentiments toward others are determined endogenously on the basis of how they perform relative to a standard of appropriate behavior. As sentiments change, so too does the optimal behavior of each individual, which in turn affects other agents' sentiments...

In this paper I consider the problem of measuring opportunity inequality when monetary transfers are possible. First, I consider the case in which agents have homogeneous preferences, as in the previous literature, and I then propose an extension to the heterogeneous case. In both, I identify an...

In this paper we present a model in which an individual's sentiments toward others are affected by how they behave relative to the societal norm. This, in turn, affects the individual's own behavior and hence other agents' sentiments toward her. We focus on stationary patterns of utility...

This paper considers the problem of equalizing opportunities among agents who differ in both their tastes and innate productive abilities when these characteristics are unobservable. The government specifically wishes to offset the effects of differences in innate talents by affording public...