Opportunity egalitarianism and income inequality

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 opportunity egalitarian principles into the formulation of classes of social evaluation functions. Finally, by requiring unanimous agreement among the member of these families, we derive various criteria, generally expressed in forms of inverse stochastic dominance conditions, for unambiguous social rankings of income distributions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.