*In the early 1970s, Equality of Opportunity became one of main lenses through which to study Social Justice. This is largely due to John Rawls’ (1971) Theory of Justice, which gave the concept its strongest philosophical background, by concluding that all men behind a veil of ignorance would choose Equality of Opportunity (EOp) as the main criterion to rank societies. In this paper, we seek to develop an EOp criterion which would best fit John Rawls’ definition. At this stage, we believe that by adapting Koshevoy and Mosler’s (1997) dominance criterion – used originally for multi-dimensional Inequality – one can obtain such a criterion. The second part of the paper will include an empirical application of the criterion to education systems using PISA data.

**We study a model of decision-making with career-concerned experts and costly information acquisition. A principal can choose between two scenarios: 1) consulting each expert individually and deciding herself or 2) delegating the whole decision-making process to an opaque committee of the experts. These two options create a trade-off between information acquisition and information aggregation. Theoretical results show that the level of cost for information acquisition determines which scenario should be preferred, with a range of low (high) costs where delegation (individual consulting) is the superior option. Testing the results in a laboratory experiment reveals that delegation always outperforms individual consultancy even when it is predicted not to. The reason for this can be pinpointed to excessive information acquisition under delegation. Interestingly, the lab subjects have an intrinsic utility of keeping the decision right and therefore forgo pecuniary incentives by preferring individual consultancy over delegation.