IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ebl/ecbull/eb-09-00665.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Measuring equality of opportunity by Shapley value

Author

Listed:
  • Giuseppe Pignataro

    (Department of Economics, University of Bologna)

Abstract

Equality of opportunity is a political ideal which requires that ex-ante inequalities, and only those inequalities, should be eliminated. Justice requires leveling the playing field by rendering everyone's opportunities equal in an appropriate sense, and then letting individual choices and their effects dictate further outcomes. In this paper we propose a methodology to decompose the path-independent Atkinson index of equality through Shapley value seeking for a measure of overall inequality produced by the marginal contributions of the opportunity and the responsibility component.

Suggested Citation

  • Giuseppe Pignataro, 2010. "Measuring equality of opportunity by Shapley value," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 30(1), pages 786-798.
    • Handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-09-00665
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2010/Volume30/EB-10-V30-I1-P73.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. A.B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (ed.), 2000. "Handbook of Income Distribution," Handbook of Income Distribution, Elsevier, edition 1, volume 1, number 1.
    2. Charles Blackorby & David Donaldson & Maria Auersperg, 1981. "A New Procedure for the Measurement of Inequality within and among Population Subgroups," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 14(4), pages 665-685, November.
    3. Daniele Checchi & Vito Peragine, 2010. "Inequality of opportunity in Italy," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 8(4), pages 429-450, December.
    4. F. Chantreuil & A. Trannoy, 1999. "Inequality decomposition values : the trade-off between marginality and consistency," THEMA Working Papers 99-24, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    5. C. Seidl & Patrick Moyes & A. F. Shorrocks, 2002. "Inequalities: Theory, experiments and applications," Post-Print hal-00157353, HAL.
    6. Vito Peragine, 2004. "Measuring and implementing equality of opportunity for income," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 22(1), pages 187-210, February.
    7. Silber, Jacques, 1993. "Inequality Decomposition by Income," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(3), pages 545-547, August.
    8. Cowell, F.A., 2000. "Measurement of inequality," Handbook of Income Distribution, in: A.B. Atkinson & F. Bourguignon (ed.), Handbook of Income Distribution, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 2, pages 87-166, Elsevier.
    9. Mercedes Sastre & Alain Trannoy, 2002. "Shapley inequality decomposition by factor components: Some methodological issues," Journal of Economics, Springer, vol. 9(1), pages 51-89, December.
    10. Silber, Jacques, 1989. "Factor Components, Population Subgroups and the Computation of the Gini Index of Inequality," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 71(1), pages 107-115, February.
    11. Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1984. "Inequality Decomposition by Population Subgroups," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(6), pages 1369-1385, November.
    12. Atkinson, Anthony B., 1970. "On the measurement of inequality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 2(3), pages 244-263, September.
    13. repec:ebl:ecbull:v:4:y:2003:i:29:p:1-12 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Mª Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Marta Urrutia, 2003. "A new factorial decomposition for the atkinson measure," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 4(29), pages 1-12.
    15. Mª Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Marta Urrutia, 2005. "Path independent multiplicatively decomposable inequality measures," Investigaciones Economicas, Fundación SEPI, vol. 29(2), pages 379-387, May.
    16. James E. Foster & Artyom A. Shneyerov, 1999. "A general class of additively decomposable inequality measures," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 14(1), pages 89-111.
    17. Foster, James E. & Shneyerov, Artyom A., 2000. "Path Independent Inequality Measures," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 199-222, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John Creedy & Nicolas Hérault†, 2011. "Decomposing Inequality and Social Welfare Changes : The Use of Alternative Welfare Metrics," Department of Economics - Working Papers Series 1121, The University of Melbourne.
    2. Palestini, Arsen & Pignataro, Giuseppe, 2016. "A graph-based approach to inequality assessment," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 455(C), pages 65-78.
    3. A. Palestini & G. Pignataro, 2013. "A multi-factor inequality approach to a transfer scheme: the case of Common Agricultural Policy," Working Papers wp891, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Urrutia, 2008. "The ‘Extended’ Atkinson family: The class of multiplicatively decomposable inequality measures, and some new graphical procedures for analysts," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 6(2), pages 211-225, June.
    2. Paolo Li Donni & Vito Peragine & Giuseppe Pignataro, 2014. "Ex‐Ante And Ex‐Post Measurement Of Equality Of Opportunity In Health: A Normative Decomposition," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(2), pages 182-198, February.
    3. Francisco J. Goerlich-Gisbert & Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Marta Urrutia, 2009. "The ‘extended’ Atkinson family and changes in the expenditure distribution. Spain 1973/74-2003," Journal of Income Distribution, Ad libros publications inc., vol. 18(1), pages 20-41, March.
    4. Frank Cowell & Carlo Fiorio, 2011. "Inequality decompositions—a reconciliation," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(4), pages 509-528, December.
    5. Frank Cowell & Carlo V. Fiorio, 2010. "GINI DP 4: Inequality Decompositions," GINI Discussion Papers 4, AIAS, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies.
    6. Satya R. Chakravarty & Pietro Muliere, 2003. "Welfare indicators: A review and new perspectives. 1. Measurement of inequality," Metron - International Journal of Statistics, Dipartimento di Statistica, Probabilità e Statistiche Applicate - University of Rome, vol. 0(3), pages 457-497.
    7. Stéphane Mussard, 2006. "Une réconciliation entre la décomposition en sous-groupes et la décomposition en sources de revenu de l'indice de Gini. La multi-décomposition de l'indicateur de Gini," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 81, pages 169-193.
    8. Stéphane Mussard & Michel Terraza, 2009. "Décompositions des mesures d'inégalité : le cas des coefficients de Gini et d'entropie," Recherches économiques de Louvain, De Boeck Université, vol. 75(2), pages 151-181.
    9. Stéphane Mussard & Françoise Seyte & Michel Terraza, 2006. "La décomposition de l’indicateur de Gini en sous-groupes : une revue de la littérature," Cahiers de recherche 06-11, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    10. Frank A Cowell, 2003. "Theil, Inequality and the Structure of Income Distribution," STICERD - Distributional Analysis Research Programme Papers 67, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    11. Judith Clarke & Nilanjana Roy, 2012. "On statistical inference for inequality measures calculated from complex survey data," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 43(2), pages 499-524, October.
    12. Osnat Israeli, 2007. "A Shapley-based decomposition of the R-Square of a linear regression," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 5(2), pages 199-212, August.
    13. Camacho Cuena, Eva & Neugebauer, Tibor & Seidl, Christian, 2005. "Compensating justice beats leaky buckets: an experimental investigation," Economics Working Papers 2005-06, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics.
    14. Stéphane Mussard, 2006. "La décomposition des mesures d’inégalité en sources de revenu : l’indice de Gini et les généralisations," Cahiers de recherche 06-05, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    15. Camacho Cuena, Eva & Neugebauer, Tibor & Seidl, Christian, 2004. "Leaky bucket Paradoxes in income inequality perceptions: an experimental investigation," Economics Working Papers 2004-04, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Department of Economics.
    16. I. Josa & A. Aguado, 2020. "Measuring Unidimensional Inequality: Practical Framework for the Choice of an Appropriate Measure," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 149(2), pages 541-570, June.
    17. Pedro Salas-Rojo & Juan Gabriel Rodríguez, 2022. "Inheritances and wealth inequality: a machine learning approach," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 20(1), pages 27-51, March.
    18. Teixidó Figueras, Jordi & Duro Moreno, Juan Antonio, 2012. "Ecological Footprint Inequality: A methodological review and some results," Working Papers 2072/203168, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Department of Economics.
    19. Mª Casilda Lasso de la Vega & Ana Marta Urrutia, 2003. "A new factorial decomposition for the atkinson measure," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 4(29), pages 1-12.
    20. Satya Chakravarty, 2001. "The Variance as a subgroup decomposable measure of inequality," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 53(1), pages 79-95, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Equality of opportunity; Shapley decomposition; Atkinson index; path independency.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D6 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics
    • I3 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-09-00665. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: John P. Conley (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.