Just lotteries

Kornhauser, Lewis A.; Sager, Lawrence G.

doi:10.1177/053901888027004001

Cited by 43 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Many scholars have examined the nature of lotteries and the reasons why people might wish to employ lotteries to make a wide variety of decisions (Duxbury, 1999;Elster, 1989;Goodwin, 2005;Kornhauser & Sager, 1988;Broome, 1984;Sher, 1980; Stone, The Logic of Random Selection, 2009; Stone, Three Arguments for Lotteries, 2010). The fascination with lotteries as a source of entertainment or guidance has inspired many works of fiction (Rhinehart, 2001;Borges, 1998;Jackson, 2009).…”

Section: How Would An Allocation-by-lottery System Work?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Allocation by Sortition Resolve the Connecticut Education-Financing Impasse?

Rodriguez¹,

DeNardis²

2011

IJE

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It has been over 40 years since Connecticut amended its Constitution to ensure citizens a right to a free public education. Despite the constitutionally prescribed right, dramatic inequities in educational conditions continued to characterize the state's K-12 educational system, especially between suburban/rural white and urban minority school districts. In the 1970s plaintiffs challenged the prevailing mechanism for allocating education funds with a host of court cases that tackled the thorny question of how much financial responsibility the state should assume to equalize the spending disparities between school districts. Prodded by court decisions, many formulas and approaches have been proposed by the Connecticut General Assembly in response to the various legal challenges yet the state has never fully funded the cost sharing formula nor lived up to the 50-50 cost sharing arrangement envisaged by some policymakers. The situation remains at an impasse with the latest court action, CCJEF v. Rell (2005), to be resolved no sooner than 2014 by most accounts.Our aim here is to offer an analysis of the decision-making environment that explains the current impasse. We contend that by applying the dual-error framework popular in other social policy settings, it is possible to understand the competing views and beliefs of those groups arrayed in opposition. We claim that the individual and political understanding and policy responses are prone to cognitive heuristics in the manner popularized by Sunstein, Schadke and Kahneman, and Kuran and Sunstein (Kuran & Sunstein, 1999; Sunstein C. , Cognition and Cost-Benefit Analysis, 2000; Schkade & Kahneman, 1998). This analytical approach entails a recognition that many policy makers fail to make decisions via the normative model of rational decision-making but rather rely subjectively on emotion, intuitions, biases, character traits, and social and cultural norms in a manner that diverges systematically from the rational model. We argue that differing subjective appraisals of the role of individual agency in the observed achievement gap is at the core of the debate. There are, of course, other inputs into the educational process. But it is this perception of agency that heavily influences the general population's political choices.The existing institutional framework appears to have cemented this worldview in a situation that has little chance of a meaningful resolution. We note the perplexing conundrum in which Connecticut finds itself and conclude that the problem is a social dilemma in which the parties involved are individually powerless to resolve. Sortition mechanisms -allocation by lottery -have been known to effectively resolve social dilemmas in other domains. We examine the possibility of relying on lots to resolve the allocation of educational monies.

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Section: How Would An Allocation-by-lottery System Work?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Allocation by Sortition Resolve the Connecticut Education-Financing Impasse?

Rodriguez¹,

DeNardis²

2011

IJE

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“…These principles are not meant to govern voluntary personal relationships. And so in the discussion of lotteries that follows, I shall assume the topic is the use of lotteries as part of the basic structure of society, the part concerned with the allocation of important scarce goods -what one might call 'social lotteries' (Kornhauser and Sager, 1988). A lottery over scarce medical resources, such as organ transplants, would clearly count as a social lottery.…”

Section: Three Principles Of Justicementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While other principles of justice, like the principle of fairness of outcomes, might be satisfied as a matter of objective fact, independently of what anyone knows about the world, the principle of fairness of treatment cannot be so satisfied. Objective equiprobability is not necessary because, as Kornhauser and Sager (1988) themselves note, a lottery that is equiprobable as far as anyone knows has virtually all the properties one might want in a lottery, regardless of whether or not the equiprobability is an objective fact. 14 This is a good thing: if objective equiprobability was 13.…”

Section: A Conclusion Regarding Probabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lotteries, Justice and Probability

Stone

2009

Journal of Theoretical Politics

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Intuition suggests that a fair lottery is the appropriate way to allocate a scarce good when two or more people have equally strong claims to it. This article lays out three conditions that any conception of justice compatible with this intuition must satisfy -efficiency of outcomes, fairness of outcomes, and fairness of treatment. The third, unlike the first two, manifests itself only in the intentions of the allocative agent, not in the final allocation itself. For this reason, while justice generally requires publicity -requires, that is, that the justice of public practices be as visible as possible -for fairness of treatment publicity is indispensable. This fact has implications for defining a fair lottery. On most accounts, fair lotteries must be equiprobable. But while some theories of probability facilitate the connection between the equiprobability of fair lotteries and the contribution they can make to justice, others do not.

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“…7 Of these rivals,Greely (1977) primarily concerns the constitutionality of lotteries and avoiding improper biases in allocation Sher (1980). is primarily concerned with what makes a lottery a fair one rather than an unfair one, but suggests lotteries can be used to ensure that no one can allocate a good simply as he wishes Kornhauser and Sager (1988). justify lotteries only when competing claims are exactly equal.…”

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confidence: 99%

Fairness Between Competing Claims

Saunders

2010

Res Publica

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Fairness is a central, but under-theorized, notion in moral and political philosophy. This paper makes two contributions. Firstly, it criticizes Broome's seminal account of fairness in (1990)(1991) Proc Aristotelian Soc 91:87-101, showing that there are problems with restricting fairness to a matter of relative satisfaction and holding that it does not itself require the satisfaction of the claims in question. Secondly, it considers the justification of lotteries to resolve cases of ties between competing claims, which Broome claims as support for his theory, and contrasts random procedures to contests of skill, which may also be considered lotteries in a broader sense. I offer no alternative account of fairness of my own, but hope to point the way for future research on the nature of fairness.The concept of fairness seems to be acquired at a very young age. Infants soon learn to complain when, for instance, one gets cake and another doesn't. Although their cries of 'that's not fair' are often self-motivated-that is, they care far more about not receiving whatever good is in question themselves, than about satisfying abstract standards of fairness-they grasp that fairness is an important value and unfairness, therefore, something at least prima facie objectionable. While exasperated parents often respond to these complaints simply by telling their children that 'life isn't fair,' we feel dissatisfaction at this. It seems that we wish that life was fair. We find it troubling if, for example, some are much better off than others through no fault of their own. This hostility to moral arbitrariness is exemplified

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Just lotteries

Cited by 43 publications

References 4 publications

Can Allocation by Sortition Resolve the Connecticut Education-Financing Impasse?

Can Allocation by Sortition Resolve the Connecticut Education-Financing Impasse?

Lotteries, Justice and Probability

Fairness Between Competing Claims

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