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Microeconomic Theory

Microeconomic Theory

The Department of Economics at the University of Warwick has an active Microeconomic Theory Research Group, with a weekly external seminar, a weekly internal workshop, and high quality PhD students. We also organise international conferences on campus, or in Venice.

Our activities

CRETA Seminars in Economic Theory

Wednesday: 4-5.30pm
Since its creation in 2006, CRETA has run a seminar series with external and internal talks on economic theory and applications. For a detailed scheduled of speakers please follow the link below:

Organisers: Daniele Condorelli and Costas Cavounidis

Micro Theory Work in Progress (MIWP) Workshop

Thursday: 1-2pm
For faculty and PhD students at Warwick and other top-level academic institutions across the world. For a detailed scheduled of speakers please follow the link below.

Organiser: Agustin Troccoli-Moretti

People

Events

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CRETA Seminar - Gabriel Carroll (Toronto)

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Location: S2.79

Title: Is Equal Opportunity Different from Welfarism?

Abstract: Equal opportunity, widely invoked in popular discourse as a goal for policy, seems at odds with the welfarist approach that is standard in economics. But are they really different? We consider a canonical class of resource allocation problems and ask whether the allocations chosen by an equal-opportunity criterion could also have been chosen under some welfarist criterion. Typically, no such welfarist criterion exists. However, for a rich class of problem specifications, it does exist, and we characterize this class. In the cases where the sought-after welfarist criterion does not exist, the basic reason is that it is overconstrained: it would have to equalize a measure of marginal welfare across too many points in allocation space. On the other hand, when the welfarist criterion does exist, it can use either the sum or the min to aggregate individual welfares; the freedom to use more exotic aggregators is not needed.

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