Equality of Opportunity: a questionnaire based study to investigate aversion to inequality due to effort

This master thesis explores the topic of inequality from a social justice perspective. Different principles of social justice have been formulated in the field of moral philosophy and translated into measures of social welfare and inequality in the field of welfare economics, particular attention has been paid to exploring the theory of Equality of Opportunity from the perspective of both philosophical doctrine and economic literature, highlighting the conflict that emerges between the principle of compensation and reward. Recently, an empirical literature on social choice has developed which aims to test, through questionnaires and experiments, the opinions and preferences of individuals with respect to the various principles of social justice. The different reward principles formulated in the Equality of Opportunity literature were used as the basis for the construction of a questionnaire, proposed to students and former students, with the aim of testing the aversion to inequality, when the inequality stems as the consequence of an individual choice of effort. Aversion to inequality due to effort was explored by collecting respondents’ preferences with respect to different proposed resource allocations consistent with the Liberal Reward Principle and the Utilitarian Reward Principle. The results collected show a general aversion to inequality due to effort, but with a substantial difference when the preferences describe an ethical choice or when they are the result of a risky choice with personal interests at stake. There is also evidence of a different aversion to inequality due to effort among subgroups of respondents with different characteristics.