Consistent updating of social welfare functions

Consistent updating of social welfare functions

It is one of the central doctrines for ”rational” decision making that an agent should be forward-looking and not be bound by things already gone. We argue that this is not an appealing principle for collective decision making, and that things already gone have necessary and substantive roles. We consider a dynamic process of social welfare orderings explicitly, and propose a discipline which i...

Quadratic Social Welfare Functions

Anonymous monotonic social welfare functions

This paper presents two results about preference domain conditions that deepen our understanding of anonymous and monotonic Arrovian social welfare functions (ASWFs). We characterize the class of anonymous and monotonic ASWFs on domains without Condorcet triples. This extends and generalizes an earlier characterization (as Generalized Majority Rules) by Moulin (Axioms of Cooperative Decision Ma...

Hyper-stable social welfare functions

We introduce a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyperstability. A social welfare function α selects a complete weak order from a profile PN of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives, given N individuals. Each linear order P in PN generates a linear order over orders of alternatives,called hyper-preference, by means of a preference extension. Henc...

Social Welfare Functions and Income Distributions

Old welfare economics, Pigou (1920), considered social welfare as a cardinal notion, while new welfare economics,1 Little (1950) and Graaff (1957), consider social welfare as an ordinal notion. An in depth introduction to welfare economics and a discussion of the transition from old to new welfare economics, is expounded quite well by Samuelson (1947, Chap. 8, pp. 203–219, and pp. 249–252). For...