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Regular version of the site

Job Market Seminar by Paolo Piacquadio (University of Oslo)

On Thursday, February 16 at 4.40 pm, ICEF and FES held the Job Market Seminar.
Speaker: Paolo Piacquadio (University of Oslo)
Theme: "A Fairness Justification of Utilitarianism"

Venue: room 3211, bld. 3, ul. Shabolovka 26

Abstract: Differences in preferences are important to explain variation in individuals' behavior. There is however no consensus on how to take these differences into account when evaluating policies. While prominent in the economic literature, the standard utilitarian criterion is controversial. According to some, interpersonal comparability of utilities involve value judgements with little objective basis. Others argue that social justice is primarily about the distribution of commodities assigned to individuals, rather than their subjective satisfaction or happiness. In this paper, we propose and axiomatically characterize a criterion, named opportunity-equivalent utilitarian, that addresses these claims. First, our criterion ranks social alternatives on the basis of individuals' ordinal preferences. Second, it compares individuals based on the fairness of their assignments. Opportunity-equivalent utilitarianism requires society to maximize the sum of specific indices of well-being that are cardinally measurable, interpersonally comparable, and represent each individual's preferences.



Forthcoming seminars
Past seminar