A fair solution to the compensation problem

We study equity in economies where agents are endowed with different, non-transferable, personal talents. To compensate them for such differences a given amount of money needs to be shared among them. We axiomatize a family of social orderings over allocations based on efficiency, fairness and robustness properties. Taking into account incentive constraints we derive the optimal policy : individuals with the same talent need to be equally compensated and only people whose level of talent is below a certain threshold should receive a positive compensation.Compensation, talents, fairness, axioms, social orderings, incentive-compatibility

Welfare economics

This paper presents the Paretian Watershed and the fundamental theorems of welfare economics. It distinguishes the British approach (à la Kaldor-Hicks) from the American approach (à la Bergson-Samuelson) to new welfare economics. It develops the more recent domains of happiness economics, the comparative approach by Amartya Sen, and the theory of fair allocation by Marc Fleurbaey

Money metric utilitarianism

We discuss a method of ranking allocations in economic environments which applies when we do not know the names or preferences of individual agents. We require that two allocations can be ranked with the knowledge only of their aggregate bundles and community indifference sets–a condition we refer to as aggregate independence. We also postulate a basic Pareto and continuity property, and a property stating that when two disjoint economies and allocations are put together, the ranking in the large economy should be consistent with the rankings in the two smaller economies (reinforcement). We show that a ranking method satisfies these axioms if and only if there is a probability measure over the strictly positive prices for which the rule ranks allocations on the basis of the random-price money-metric utilitarian rule. This is a rule which computes the money-metric utility for each agent at each price, sums these, and then takes an expectation according to the probability measure

A comparison of optimal tax policies when compensation or responsibility matter

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor, that either work or not. With such double heterogeneity, traditional Welfarist criteria including Utilitarianism fail to take the compensation-responsibility trade-off into account. As a response, several other criteria have been proposed in the literature. This paper is the first to compare the extent to which optimal policies based on different normative criteria obey the principles of compensation (for differential skills) and responsibility (for preferences for labor), when labor supply is along the extensive margin. The criteria from the social choice literature perform better in this regard than the traditional criteria, both in first and second best. More importantly, these equality of opportunity criteria push the second best policy away from an Earned Income Tax Credit and in the direction of a Negative Income tax.optimal income taxation, equality of opportunity, heterogeneous preferences for labor

A Comparison of Optimal Tax Policies when Compensation or Responsibility Matter

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high- and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor. We compare the extent to which optimal policies based on different normative criteria obey the principles of compensation (for differential skills) and responsibility (for preferences for labor) when labor supply is along the extensive margin. With heterogeneity in skills and preferences, traditional Welfarist criteria including Utilitarianism present unappealing policy recommendations in some scenarios as they fail to take compensation and responsibility issues into account. Criteria from the social choice literature perform better in this regard in first-and second-best. More importantly, these equality of opportunity criteria push the second-best policy away from an Earned Income Tax Credit and in the direction of a Negative Income Tax.optimal income taxation, equality of opportunity, heterogeneous preferences for labor

Fair social orderings when agents have unequal production skills

International audienceWe develop an approach which escapes Arrow's impossibility by relying on information about agents' indifference curves instead of utilities. In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we characterize social ordering functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information about individual preferences. These social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in skills, and equal access to resources for all preferences

Empirical welfare analysis : when preferences matter

Fleurbaey and Maniquet have proposed the criteria of conditional equality and of egalitarian equivalence to assess the equity among individuals in an ordinal setting. Empirical applications are rare and only partially consistent with their framework. We propose a new empirical approach that relies on individual preferences, is consistent with the ordinal criteria and enables to compare them with the cardinal criteria. We estimate a utility function that incorporates individual heterogeneous preferences, obtain ordinal measures of well-being and apply conditional equality and egalitarian equivalence. We then propose two cardinal measures of well-being, that are comparable with the ordinal model, to compute Roemer's and Van de gaer's criteria. Finally we compare the characteristics of the worst-off displayed by each criterion. We apply this model to a sample of US micro data and obtain that about 18% of the worst-off are not common to all criteria

Fair social orderings when agents have unequal production skills

We develop an approach which escapes Arrow’s impossibility by relying on information about agents’ indifference curves instead of utilities. In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we characterize social ordering functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information about individual preferences. These social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in skills, and equal access to resources for all preferences. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2005

Empirical approaches to inequality of opportunity : principles, measures, and evidence

We put together the different conceptual issues involved in measuring inequality of opportunity, discuss how these concepts have been translated into computable measures, and point out the problems and choices researchers face when implementing these measures. Our analysis identifies and suggests several new possibilities to measure inequality of opportunity. The approaches are illustrated with a selective survey of the empirical literature on income inequality of opportunity