On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Economic Environments

• DOI: 10.1006/jeth.2000.2645
• Publication Date: 2002-09-18T14:19:44Z
• Authors: Prasanta K. Patta...; Yongsheng Xu
• Keywords: 0502 economics and business; 05 social sciences

Abstract This paper examines how freedom of choice as reflected in an agent's opportunity sets can be measured in economic environments where opportunity sets are non empty and compact subsets of the non-negative orthant of the n -dimensional real space. Several plausible axioms are proposed for this purpose. It is then shown that, under different sets of axioms, one can represent the ranking of compact opportunity sets by different types of real-valued functions with intuitively plausible properties. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D63, D70.