Yan Kervinio soutiendra sa thèse « Assessing the Fairness of Public Policies » le 22 janvier 2016 Salle MS 003 à 14h30.
Composition du jury
- Monsieur Stefan AMBEC , Chercheur TSE, Directeur de recherche INRA - Toulouse
- Monsieur Michel LE BRETON, Chercheur TSE, Professeur, Université Toulouse 1 Capitole
- Monsieur Marc FLEURBAEY professeur, Université de Princeton
- Monsieur Dominique BUREAU, Chargé de cours, Ecole Polytechnique
- Monsieur Juan D. MORENO-TORNERO, professeur, Université Pablo de Olavide - Séville
Résumé (en anglais)
This thesis is about the assessment of the fair character of public policies with well-understood distributive impacts. Because of the diversity of existing judgments on this matter, there is no single approach to carry out such an assessment. This work rests upon the theory of fair allocations and the empirical study of fairness judgments. After presenting each of these approaches and discussing how they could contribute to form practical policy recommendations in three short chapters, three contributions to the literature are presented. All are motivated by the so-called NIMBY (“Not In My Back-Yard”) problem, in which a group of communities faces the opportunity of implementing an economically beneficial, yet locally undesirable, project (e.g. a wastewater treatment plant, a landfill, a wind park, etc).
In the first article, I consider the problem of allocating a single, indivisible project and sharing its benefit among communities with an equal right on it but featuring different provision costs. The differences in these costs may arise from variations in building, operation and maintenance costs for the project but also from differences in the communities' compensation requirements for hosting the project. In this setting, I characterise three allocation rules that correspond to three prominent cooperative solution concepts: the welfare egalitarian solution, the nucleolus and the Shapley value. The principles invoked involve Pareto efficiency, Anonymity, No envy, and axioms of solidarity or reward related to the communities' provision costs. The results clarify how considerations over the nature of the costs could influence fair allocations. The analysis is then extended to settings with asymmetric information and to setting with costs of several kinds. In each extension, I propose and motivate a fair solution. The results of a survey motivated by this analysis are eventually presented.
In the second article, I study individual fairness judgments and preferences for the allocation of an indivisible task and its benefit among two individuals with a different willingness to perform it. My approach relates results from the theory of fair allocations with the empirical observation of fairness judgments and preferences. I first present and motivate four contrasted allocation rules. For some of the participants, a questionnaire was proposed before they knew about their situation. Among the four rules of judgment proposed, the welfare egalitarian allocation rule is the most preferred allocation rule as stated by the participants. Yet, I also observe support for principles that are not compatible with this rule of judgment: an important proportion of respondents deem fair to give nothing to someone who would not be willing to perform the task, and another substantial proportion deem fair to split the benefit of the task equally when both participants feature the same compensation requirement. In the experiment, participants had the opportunity to perform a task for pay. However, for any two of them, a single task was available. As required by the Pareto principle, it was allocated to the participant with the lower compensation requirement. In this situation, the stated normative expectations of the task performer are found to be higher, the greater the discrepancy between the compensation requirements. This does not extend to individual distributive preferences as revealed by the offers in a dictator setting. I also find that the task performers who took the questionnaire would deem the equal split fair less often. Overall, few respondents are consistent with any of the four rules proposed.
In the third article, jointly written with Stefan Ambec, we consider the decentralised provision of a global public good with local externalities in a spatially explicit model. Communities decide on the location of a facility that benefits everyone but exhibits costs to the host and its neighbors. They share the costs through transfers. We examine cooperative games associated with this so-called NIMBY problem. We derive and discuss conditions for core solutions to exist. These conditions are driven by the temptation to exclude groups of neighbors at any potential location. We illustrate the results in different spatial settings. These results clarify how property rights can affect cooperation and shed further light on a limitation of the Coase theorem.
