Caterina Calsamiglia

Decentralizing Equality of Opportunity

In a global justice problem, equality of opportunity is satisfied if individual well-being is independent of exogenous irrelevant characteristics. Policymakers, however, address questions involving local justice problems. We interpret a collection of local justice problems as the decentralized global justice problem. We show that controlling for effort locally, which is not required by the global justice objective, is sufficient for decentralizing equality of opportunity. Moreover, under some conditions, equalizing rewards to effort is not only sufficient but necessary. This implies in particular that most affirmative action policies may not contribute to providing equality of opportunity.

A comment on “School choice: An experimental study” [J. Econ. Theory 127 (1) (2006) 202–231]☆

We show that one of the main results in Chen and Sonmez (2006, 2008) [6] and [7] does no longer hold when the number of recombinations is sufficiently increased to obtain reliable conclusions. No school choice mechanism is significantly superior in terms of efficiency.

Fictive Learning in Choice under Uncertainty: A Logistic Regression Model

This paper is an exposition of an experiment on revealed preferences, where we posit a novel discrete binary choice model. To estimate this model, we use general estimating equations or GEE. This is a methodology originating in biostatistics for estimating regression models with correlated data. In this paper, we focus on the motivation for our approach, the logic and intuition underlying our analysis and a summary of our findings. The missing technical details are in the working paper by Bunn et al. (2013). The experimental data is available from the corresponding author: donald.brown@yale.edu. The recruiting poster and informed consent form are attached as appendices.

Alfred Marshall's Cardinal Theory of Value: The Strong Law of Demand

We show that all the fundamental properties of competitive equilibrium in Marshalls cardinal theory of value, as presented in Note XXI of the mathematical appendix to his Principles of Economics (1890), derive from the Strong Law of Demand. That is, existence, uniqueness, optimality, and global stability of equilibrium prices with respect to tatonnement price adjustment follow from the cyclical monotonicity of the market demand function in the Marshallian general equilibrium model.