The veil of ignorance has been used often as a tool for recommending what justice requires with respect to the distribution of wealth. We complete Harsanyi’s model of the veil of ignorance by appending information permitting interpersonal comparability of welfare. We show that the veil-of-ignorance conception of John Harsanyi, so completed, and Ronald Dworkin’s, when modeled formally, recommend...

In this work we deal with rationing problems. In particular with claims problems with indivisible goods, that is, problems in which a certain amount of indivisible units (of an homogeneous good), has to be distributed among a group of agents, when this amount is not enough to satisfy agents' demands. We define discrete rules to solve those problems that involve notions of fairness similar to th...

Wecharacterize the familyofnon-contestablebudget-monotone rules for the allocation of objects and money as those obtained by maximizing a min social welfare function among all non-contestable allocations. We provide three additional seemingly independent approaches to construct these rules. We present three applications of this characterization. First, we show that one can “rectify” any non-con...

To encourage diversity, branches may vary contracts’ priorities across slots. The agents who match to branches, however, have preferences only over match partners and contractual terms. Ad hoc approaches to resolving agents’ indifferences across slots in the Chicago and Boston school choice programs have introduced biases, which can be corrected with more careful market design. Slot-specific pr...

Equity and Efficiency in Multi-Worker Firms: Insights from Experimental Economics In this paper, we discuss recent evidence from economic experiments that study the impact of social preferences on workplace behavior. We focus on situations in which a single employer interacts with multiple employees. Traditionally, equity and efficiency have been seen as opposing aims in such work environments:...

This paper proposes a simpler interpretation of Harsanyi’s impartial observer idea. It postulates an impartiality axiom with respect to the distributions of a certain “benchmark good”. The axiom requires society to be indifferent between each distribution of the good and an equiprobable lottery among all distributions that differ from it only in the matching between individuals and allocations ...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it shows the properties that regional economics is implicitly assuming when “relative” inequality measures, such as the Gini coefficient and the generalized entropy family of indexes, are used to quantify the geographic concentration of economic activity. Second, it proposes a new geographic concentration index that is based on an “absolute” inequality m...

To take into account both ex ante and ex post inequality considerations, one has to deal with inequality and uncertainty simultaneously. Under certainty, much of the literature has focused on ``comonotonically linear'' indices: functionals that are linear on cones of income profiles that agree on the social ranking of the individuals. This family generalizes both the Gini index and the egalitar...

The discounted utilitarian criterion for infinite horizon social choice has been criticized for treating generations unequally. We propose an extended rank-discounted utilitarian (ERDU) criterion instead. The criterion amounts to discounted utilitarianism on non-decreasing streams, but it treats all generations impartially: discounting becomes the mere expression of intergenerational inequality...

We reconsider the principles of diminishing transfer (introduced by Kolm (1976)) and dual diminishing transfer (introduced by Mehran (1976)). It appears that if a Rank Dependent Expected Utility (RDEU) maximizer respects the principle of diminishing (resp. dual diminishing) transfer, then he behaves in accordance with the Expected Utility model (resp. Yaari’s dual model). This leads us to defin...