RANKING OPPORTUNITY PROFILES ON THE BASIS OF THE COMMON OPPORTUNITIES

In this paper we study the problem of ranking profiles of opportunity sets, one for each agent in the society. An interesting way of capturi ng the notion of equality of opportunities is to consider the intersec tion of all agents' opportunity sets for each profile, since it coinci des with the set of opportunities to which all individuals have access . A family of rankings fulfilling different domain requirements is con sidered, For any ranking in that family, a way of ranking individual s ets emerges. We propose three ways of ranking opportunity profiles, al l of them looking first at the common opportunity set. If this is not decisive, additional criteria are used in a lexicographic way. We prov ide axiomatic characterizations for each of these methods. (C) 1998 El sevier Science B.V.