Feminism, agency and objectivity

In this article I defend the capability approach by focusing on its built-in gender-sensitivity and on its concern with comprehensive outcomes and informationally-rich evaluation of well-being, two elements of Sen's work that are too rarely put together. I then try to show what the capability approach would have to gain by focusing on trans-positional objectivity (as Elizabeth Anderson does) and by leaving behind the narrow confines of states in favor of a more cosmopolitan stance. These preliminary discussions are followed by two more precise applications. At first, I show how a gender-sensitive capability approach that respects the criteria of trans-positional objectivity and cosmopolitanism can enhance the agency of women inhabiting third-world societies. I turn next to show how mainstream feminism can insulate itself against criticisms such as bell hooks' by switching to trans-positional objectivity in public reasoning

Freedom, Opportunity and Wellbeing

This paper reexamines key results from the measurement of opportunity freedom, or the extent to which a set of options offers a decision maker real opportunities to achieve. Three cases are investigated: no preferences, a single preference, and plural preferences. The three co the cardinality relation, the indirect utility relation, and the effective freedom relation variations are considered within a common axiomatic framework. Special attention is given to representations of freedom rankings, with the goal of providing practical approaches for measuring opportunity freedom and the extent of capabilities.

On Procedural Freedom of Choice

Numerous works in the last decade have analyzed the question of how to compare opportunity sets as a way to measure and evaluate individual freedom of choice.This paper defends that, in many contexts, external procedural aspects that are associated to an opportunity set should be taken into account when making judgements about the freedom of choice an agent enjoys.We propose criteria for comparing procedure-based opportunity sets that are consistent with both the procedural aspect of freedom and most of the standard theories of ranking opportunity sets.opportunity set;freedom of choice

Social choice and the indexing dilemma

This paper distinguishes an index ordering and a social ordering function as a simple way to formalize the indexing problem in the social choice framework. Two main conclusions are derived. First, the alleged dilemma between welfarism and perfectionnism is shown to involve a third possibility, exemplified by the fairness approach to social choice. Second, the idea that an individual is better off than another whenever he has more (goods, functionings...) in all dimensions, which is known to enter in conflict with the Pareto principle, can be partly salvaged by adopting the fairness approach.social choice, indexing, Pareto, well-being

Please, talk about it! When hotel popularity boosts preferences

Many consumers post on-line reviews, affecting the average evaluation of products and services. Yet, little is known about the importance of the number of reviews for consumer decision making. We conducted an on-line experiment (n= 168) to assess the joint impact of the average evaluation, a measure of quality, and the number of reviews, a measure of popularity, on hotel preference. The results show that consumers' preference increases with the number of reviews, independently of the average evaluation being high or low. This is not what one would expect from an informational point of view, and review websites fail to take this pattern into account. This novel result is mediated by demographics: young people, and in particular young males, are less affected by popularity, relying more on quality. We suggest the adoption of appropriate ranking mechanisms to fit consumer preferences. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

Social learning with local interactions

We study a simple dynamic model of social learning with local informational exter-nalities. There is a large population of agents, who repeatedly have to choose one, out of two, reversible actions, each of which is optimal in one, out of two, unknown states of the world. Each agent chooses rationally, on the basis of private information (s)he receives by a symmetric binary signal on the state, as well as the observation of the action chosen among their nearest neighbours. Actions can be updated at revision opportunities that agents receive in a random sequential order. Strategies are stationary, in that they do not depend on time, nor on location. We show that: if agents receive equally informative signals, and observe both neighbours, then the social learning process is not adequate and the process of actions converges ex-ponentially fast to a con�guration where some agents are permanently wrong; if agents are unequally informed, in that their signal is either fully informative or fully uninformative (both with positive probability), and observe one neighbour, then the social learning process is adequate and everybody will eventually choose the action that is correct given the state. Convergence, however, obtains very slowly, namely at rate pt: We relate the�findings with the literature on social learning and discuss the property of effciency of the information transmission mechanism under local interaction. <br><br> Keywords; social learning, bayesian learning, local informational external-ities, path dependence, consensus, clustering, convergence Rates

Informing Students about Their College Options: A Proposal for Broadening the Expanding College Opportunities Project

Most high-achieving, low-income students do not even apply to selective colleges despite being highly qualified for admission and success at these institutions. Because they do not apply, these students forgo the generous academic resources, increased financial aid, and better collegiate and career opportunities that selective schools offer. To increase opportunities and improve outcomes for these students, we propose building on the success of an innovative intervention, the Expanding College Opportunities (ECO) Project. At a relatively low cost of about $6 per student contacted, ECO sent the following to high-achieving, low-income students: targeted and personalized information on their college options, information on the process for applying, and details of the financial information relevant to their situations. The intervention had a profound effect on their college application behavior, leading to a substantial increase in their propensity to apply to more-selective colleges commensurate with their academic achievements. Not only did students apply to more-selective schools, but they were accepted and matriculated at such schools in greater numbers, and early evidence points to their academic success in these programs. The promising results of this low-cost program suggest that ECO should be expanded. This paper proposes steps to expand and improve ECO to reach more low-income, high-achieving students across the country by partnering with respected third-party organizations such as the College Board and ACT. ECO can also serve as a model for designing and applying this type of intervention to other populations of students. The success of the ECO Project highlights the importance of researchers being able to access relevant government data to design targeted and effective programs and polici

Should we pay for ecosystem service outputs, inputs or both?

Payments for ecosystem service outputs have recently become a popular policy prescription for a range of agri-environmental schemes. The focus of this paper is on the choice of contract instruments to incentivise the provision of ecosystem service outputs from farms. The farmer is better informed than the regulator in terms of hidden information about costs and hidden-actions relating to effort. The results show that with perfect information, the regulator can contract equivalently on inputs or outputs. With hidden information, input-based contracts are more cost effective at reducing the informational rent related to adverse selection than output-based contracts. Mixed contracts are also cost-effective, especially where one input is not observable. Such contracts allow the regulator to target variables that are “costly-to-fake” as opposed to those prone to moral hazard such as effort. Further results are given for fixed price contracts and input-based contracts with moral hazard. The model is extended to include a discussion of repeated contracting and the scope that exists for the regulator to benefit from information revealed by the initial choice of contract. The models are applied to a case study of contracting with farmers to protect high biodiversity native vegetation that also provides socially-valuable ecosystem services

On Non-welfarist Social Ordering Functions

In this paper, criticizing the welfarist's framework in traditional welfare economics which provides a rather limited perspective for social evaluation, we propose a more comprehensive framework in which extended social ordering functions (ESOFs) are introduced. In this framework, not only welfaristic values, but also non-welfaristic values can be treated appropriately. Then, we examine the possibility of non-welfarist ESOFs which meet a value of Individual Autonomy, a criterion of non-welfairst distributive justice, and the welfarist Pareto principle. First, there is no first best ESOF in the sense that the above three axioms are satisfied simultaneously. Second, however, we can show the existence of some second best ESOFs, using a weaker lexicographic application method.