Even relatively poor people oppose high rates of redistribution because of the anticipation that they, or their children, may make it up the income ladder. This "prospect of upward mobility" (POUM) hypothesis is often advanced as one of the factors limiting the extent of redistribution in democracies. But is it compatible with all voters holding rational expectations? This paper establishes the formal basis for the POUM mechanism. There is a range of incomes below the mean where agents oppose lasting redistributions, if (and, in a sense, only if) tomorrow's expected income is increasing and concave in today's income. The coalition against more redistributive policies is larger, the more concave the transition function, and the longer the policy horizon. We illustrate the general analysis with an example where, in every period, 3/4 of families are poorer than average, yet a 2/3 majority has expected future incomes above the mean, and therefore desires low tax rates for all future generations. Using mobility matrices from the PSID, we also make a …rst pass at an empirical assessment of the POUM mechanism. We …nd that this e¤ect is indeed present in the data, but probably dominated by the demand for insurance.

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We study the problem of obtaining an expected utility representation for a potentially incomplete preference relation over lotteries by means of a set of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. It is shown that, when the prize space is a compact metric space, a preference relation admits such a multi-utility representation provided that it satisfies the standard axioms of expected utility theory. Moreover, the representing set of utilities is unique in a welldefined sense. r

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