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

Ranking Sets Additively in Decisional Contexts: An Axiomatic Characterization

Ranking finite subsets of a given set X of elements is the formal object of analysis in this paper. This problem has found a wide range of economic interpretations in the literature. The focus of the paper is on the family of rankings that are additively representable. Existing characterizations are too complex and hard to grasp in decisional contexts. Furthermore, Fishburn [13] showed that the number of sufficient and necessary conditions that are needed to characterize such a family has no upper bound as the cardinality of X increases. In turn, this paper proposes a way to overcome these difficulties and allows for the characterization of a meaningful (sub)family of additively representable rankings of sets by means of a few simple axioms. Pattanaik and Xu's [21] characterization of the cardinalitybased rule will be derived from our main result, and other new rules that stem from our general proposal are discussed and characterized in even simpler terms. In particular, we analyze restricted-cardinality based rules, where the set of "focal" elements is not given ex-ante; but brought out by the axioms.

Cardinality-based equality of opportunities

Equality of opportunities, Opportunity profile, Lexicographic and Weighted procedures, D63,