Exploitation in Economies with Heterogeneous Preferences, Skills and Assets: An Axiomatic Approach

This paper provides a novel axiomatic analysis of exploitation as the unequal exchange of labour in economies with heterogeneous opti-mising agents endowed with unequal amounts of physical and human capital. A de.nition of exploitation is proposed, which emphasises the relational nature of exploitation and the resulting inequalities in the allocation of labour and income. It is shown that, among all of the major de.nitions, this is the only one which satis.es two formally weak and normatively salient axioms, and allows one to generalise a number of core insights of exploitation theory.