Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Since it has been shown that completeness and constructiveness is an unattainable goal for paretian and anonymous social welfare relations on infinite utility streams, recent contributions generally propose criteria displaying some incomparability. I suggest an interpretation of incomparability which sets a limit to the recourse to the judgment of incomparability when certain intergenerational choice axioms are to be satisfied. It leads to see as incompatible the axioms fixed step relative anonymity and stationarity. This conclusion is obtained thanks to a generalization to infinite dimension of a lemma of [d’Aspremont-Gevers 1977] on the equivalence between relative anonymity and anonymity. It contrasts with [Asheim-d’Aspremont-Banerjee 2008] who build a preorder satisfying both fixed step relative anonymity and stationarity. The reason of this disagreement is that their result is obtained at the cost of additional judgments of incomparability which are not justified according to the interpretation of incomparability suggested here.