Gravel
Nicolas Gravel
Publications
We provide an axiomatic characterization of a family of criteria for ranking completely uncertain and/or ambiguous decisions. A completely uncertain decision is described by the set of all its consequences (assumed to be finite). An ambiguous decision is described as a set of possible probability distributions over a set of prizes. Every criterion in the family compares sets on the basis of their conditional expected utility , for some “likelihood” function taking strictly positive values and some utility function both having the universe of alternatives as their domain.
In this paper, we theoretically characterize robust empirically implementable normative criteria for evaluating socially risky situations. Socially risky situations are modeled as distributions, among individuals, of lotteries on a finite set of state-contingent pecuniary consequences. Individuals are assumed to have selfish Von Neumann–Morgenstern preferences for these socially risky situations. We provide empirically implementable criteria that coincide with the unanimity, over a reasonably large class of such individual preferences, of anonymous and Pareto-inclusive Von Neuman Morgenstern social rankings of risks. The implementable criteria can be interpreted as sequential expected poverty dominance. An illustration of the usefulness of the criteria for comparing the exposure to unemployment risk of different segments of the French and US workforce is also provided. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015
This paper examines the segregative properties of endogenous processes of jurisdiction formation in the presence of a competitive land market. In the considered model, a continuum of households with different income levels and the same preference for local public goods, private spending and housing choose a location from a finite set. Each location has an initial endowment of housing that is priced competitively and that belongs to absentee landlords. Each location is also endowed with a specific technology for producing public goods. Households' preferences are assumed to be homothetically separable between local public goods on the one hand and private spending and housing on the other. Public goods provision is financed by a given, but unspecified, mixture of (linear) wealth and housing taxes. It is shown that stable jurisdiction structures are segregated by income only if households have a Marshallian demand for any public good (conditionally on the quantities of the other public goods) that is a monotonic function of the price of private spending. It is also shown that if there is only one public good, or if household preferences are additively separable between public and private goods, then the condition is also sufficient for segregation. Examples showing the sensitivity of the results to the assumptions of homothetic separability and additive separability are also provided.
This paper examines the segregative properties of Tiebout-type process of jurisdiction formation by freely mobile households in the presence of a central government which makes equalization transfers across jurisdictions so as to maximize a generalized utilitarian or a max–min objective. It is shown that the introduction of such a central government significantly affects the set of stable jurisdiction structures. It is also shown that the class of households additively separable preferences that guarantees the wealth segregation of any stable jurisdiction structure is unaffected by the presence of a central government if this government uses a generalized utilitarian objective. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013
We show that it is possible to reconcile the utilitarian and welfarist principles under the requirement of unanimity provided that the set of profiles over which the consensus is attained is rich enough. More precisely, we identify a closedness condition which, if satisfied by a class of n-tuples of utility functions, guarantees that the rankings of social states induced by utilitarian and welfarist unanimities over that class are identical. We illustrate the importance of the result for the measurement of unidimensional as well as multidimensional inequalities from a dominance point of view. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013
We provide an axiomatic characterization of a family of criteria for ranking completely uncertain and/or ambiguous decisions. A completely uncertain decision is described by the finite set of all its consequences. An ambiguous decision is described as a finite set of possible probability distributions over a finite set of prizes. Every criterion in the characterized family can be thought of as assigning to every consequence (probability distribution) of a decision an equal probability of occurrence and as comparing decisions on the basis of the expected utility of their consequences (probability distributions) for some utility function.
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We provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes, one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non-transferable. The result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard Hardy–Littlewood–Pólya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute. More specifically, we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non-increasing in the ordinal attribute. We establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi-ordering introduced by Bourguignon [12]. Finally, we show that, if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion, then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations.
The normative foundations of the comparison of distributions of a single attribute between a given number of individuals are by now well-established. They originate in the equivalence between four plausible answers to the question of when a distribution x can be considered normatively better than a distribution y.
