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...

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...

. We present a model in which an individual's sentiments toward others are determined endogenously on the basis of how they perform relative to the societal average. This, in turn, affects the individual's own behavior and hence other agents' sentiments toward her. We focus on stationary...

In this paper, we extend the axiomatic analysis of equitable opportunities developed in Kranich [6] from finite to continuous opportunity sets. This extended framework is amenable to economic applications. The main results establish conditions under which an ordinal ranking of profiles of...

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...

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...

We model the interaction between an employer and a worker with interdependent preferences in a simple one-shot production process. In particular, we assume that the worker becomes kinder if she senses that her employer is an altruist. We assume that intentions are private information. Thus, the...