Assessing the fairness of public policies : proposal for an approach with an illustration for the location of locally undesirable land uses.

Summary Assessing the fairness of a public policy is not self-evident, as the criteria associated with the idea of fairness are diverse, imprecise and potentially contradictory. In this thesis, a two-stage approach is developed and discussed, which aims to identify equitable public policy options that are likely to be the subject of consensus after deliberation among those concerned. First, it is proposed to clarify the principles invoked and their articulation in a formalized decision-making context. Such an approach emphasizes the necessary trade-offs between these principles and makes it possible to identify possibilities for reconciling them, sometimes in a new way. Next, it is proposed to evaluate the fairness of the options identified on the basis of the judgments and values of the people concerned, as they can be observed through survey work or laboratory experiments. This approach is then implemented in a particular decision-making context where equity is a strong expectation: the location of socially desirable but locally undesirable public facilities. In the fourth chapter, I study the properties of different decision rules in a simple setting where a single indivisible project must be allocated among several agents with varying costs and compensation requirements. In the fifth chapter, I present the results of a laboratory experiment that focuses on the judgments of subjects placed in a situation similar to the one studied in the previous chapter. Finally, a last chapter is devoted to the study of some implications of a generalization of the initial framework to a set of situations that allows for the existence of externalities.