The adoption of gender quotas in electoral lists, like the recent “parity law” in France, can be fully rationalized on the basis of the self interest of male incumbent politicians. This paper explains why the parity law was approved in its form and, at the same time, why it has not been very...

A welfarist way of allocating resources consists in 1) equipping individuals with comparable indices of their well-being and 2) applying a unique aggregation rule to individual well-being levels. An equality of opportunity way of allocating resources consists in 1) making the distinction between...

We study fairness in economies with one private good and one partially excludable nonrival good. A social ordering function determines for each profile of preferences an ordering of all conceivable allocations. We propose the following Free Lunch Aversion condition: if the private good...

In the assignment problem of indivisible objects with money, we study social ordering functions which satisfy the requirement that social orderings should be independent of changes in preferences over infeasible bundles. We combine this axiom with efficiency, consistency and equity axioms. Our...

We study equity in economies where a set of agents commonly own a technology producing a non-rival good from their private contributions. A social ordering function associates to each economy a complete ranking of the allocations. We build social ordering functions satisfying the property that...

The adoption of mandatory gender quotas in party lists has been a subject of discussion in many countries. Since any reform obviously requires the approval of a (sometimes qualified) majority of incumbent legislators' votes, keeping an eye on incumbents' interests and incentives in different...

The adoption of gender quotas in party lists has been a voluntary decision by many parties in many countries, and is now a subject of discussion in many others. The Parity Low passed in France in 2001 is particularly interesting because for the first time the quota was set at 50 percent, and the...