Ranking opportunity profiles through dependent evaluation of policies

Rankings to evaluate opportunity distributions present in most of the literature judge a policy (change from one distribution of opportunities to another) on the basis of the changes created and, thus, independently of the original situation. This paper proposes a group of axioms capturing the idea that rankings of equality of opportunities might consider not only the changes promoted, but also the initial situation in society. The combination of this group of axioms with other well-established properties enables us to characterize two families of new opportunity distribution rankings. The first family weighs each individual's percentage share in the total number of opportunities, while the second weighs opportunities depending on how many agents have them available. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.