In any legal system, one finds numerous rules and practices as well as constitutional provisions which are incompatible with utilitarian considerations. These rules and practices often grant benefits to an individual whose wellbeing is at risk; yet the costs of these benefits to other individuals outweigh the benefits. Thus, for instance, despite the persistent belief of economists that efficie...

As a collective group, scientists would probably vote slightly left of the centre, be more liberal in their political and social views and would be genuinely concerned about inequalities in society. Scientists rarely use the word ‘elite’ without some apologetic justification, yet we constantly speak about selection through excellence—and hence exclusion of a nonelite—without any blushes. Althou...

A homogeneous resource coming from several suppliers is divided among agents with singlepeaked preferences. Each agent has access to an arbitrary fixed subset of supliers. Examples include balancing the workload of machines, sharing earmarked funds between different projects, and distributing utilities under geographic constraints. Unlike in the one supplier model (Sprumont [25]), in a Pareto o...

The paper aims at extending the egalitarian principle to environments with asymmetric information. It starts by emphasizing the accrued difficulty of deriving axiomatic results under incomplete information, given that incentive constraints and asymmetric beliefs restrict the shape of the feasible sets of interim utilities. Particularly, natural axioms of anonymity, efficiency and monotonicity a...

When discussing theories of justice, most philosophers take the moral equality human beings as their starting point. As Will Kymlicka says, in all contemporary plausible constitutes an “egalitarian plateau”.1 Arguably, prominent novel theory justice recent years is relational egalitarianism—a on which requires people to relate equals. Relational egalitarians are no exception Kymlicka's claim. T...

Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through a population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in gender equality. Second, value-shift arguments contend that gender norms change with economic affluenc...

In order to study the implications of the opportunity egalitarian theory of justice for the definition of welfare and inequality criteria, in this paper we extend the rank-dependent approach to the measurement of social welfare, suggested by Yaari [J. Econ. Theory 44 (1988)], to the case of income distributions which can be decomposed across homogeneous sub-groups. We then capture (some of) the...

Liberal egalitarian theories of justice share the egalitarian ideal that inequalities due to factors beyond individual control should be eliminated. This justifies that individuals sometimes receive more (or less) than their marginal productivity, which in turn implies that a change in one individual’s effort sometimes will affect the post-tax income of others. What restrictions should we place...