752,555 research outputs found

    Introduction to social choice and welfare

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    Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies. The Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, which is edited by Kenneth Arrow, Amartya Sen and Kotaro Suzumura, presents, in two volumes, essays on past and on-going work in social choice theory and welfare economics. This paper is written as an extensive introduction to the Handbook with the purpose of placing the broad issues examined in the two volumes in better perspective, discussing the historical background of social choice theory, the vistas opened by Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values, the famous "socialist planning" controversy, and the theoretical and practical significance of social choice theory.social choice theory, welfare economics, socialist planning controversy, social welfare function, Arrovian impossibility theorems, voting schemes, implementation theory, equity and justice, welfare and rights, functioning and capability, procedural fairness

    From social choice functions to dictatorial social welfare functions

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    A procedure to construct a social welfare function from a social choice function is suggested and it is shown that the dictatorial are the only unanimous social welfare functions that can be reconstructed from a social choice function that does not change the social choice when a defeated alternative is moved to the last position in all the individual preferences.

    Health Adjusted GDP (HAGDP) Measures of the Relationship Between Economic Growth, Health Outcomes and Social Welfare

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    Welfare economic analysis of health issues and policies can provide well balanced orderings of the state of the economy. This paper provides an innovative framework for welfare economic analysis of the relationships between economic growth, health outcomes and social welfare for both a developing and a developed country. Economic growth can increase health outcomes and social welfare but its influence is limited by biological laws. Further, achieving economic growth may have negative externalities which reduce health outcomes (particularly when biological health limits are reached). A new health adjusted GDP indicator to investigate the relationship between economic growth, health outcomes and social welfare in both a developing and developed country using social choice perspectives is developed in this paper. This new approach to social welfare analysis is also based on cost-benefit analysis and systems analysis and is called the social choice approach. The importance of good health is crucial when determining social welfare. The major limitation of many health-based indicators is that they can fail to adequately consider social welfare issues, such as equity and efficiency. Social choice theory allows optimal health outcomes to be fully considered in terms of equity and efficiency when determining the impact of economic growth on social welfare. Social choice theory incorporates the various “social concerns” that are not adequately captured using individual preference satisfaction techniques. This paper analyses the health outcomes resulting from economic growth (costs and benefits) using Thailand and Australia as case studies, from 1975 to 1999. Two health adjusted gross domestic product (HAGDP) indices are prepared in this paper by adjusting GDP to reflect the social welfare impacts of achieving economic growth on health outcomes.

    Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice

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    In an infinite-horizon setting, Ferejohn and Page showed that any social welfare function satisfying Arrow’s axioms and stationarity must be a dictatorship of the first generation. Packel strengthened this result by proving that no collective choice rule generating complete social preferences can satisfy unlimited domain, weak Pareto and stationarity. We prove that this impossibility survives under a domain restriction and without completeness. We propose a more suitable stationarity axiom and show that a social welfare function on a specific domain satisfies this modified version and some standard social choice axioms if and only if it is a chronological dictatorshipMulti-Profile Social Choice, Infinite-Horizon Intergenerational Choice, Lexicographic Dictatorships

    Financing higher education: public choice and social welfare

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    This paper considers the use of fees versus the use of taxation for the finance of higher education in a framework that pays special attention to some of the interdependencies involved. In particular, the use of subsidies, in the form of a higher education grant to students, involves, via the government’s budget constraint, an increase in taxation. This increase in income taxation imposes an obvious burden on those who do not invest in higher education, but it is not a ‘free’ good from the point of view of the grant recipients who must pay higher taxes than otherwise during their working lives. This component of taxation may be called a deferred fee.

    Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice

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    Ferejohn and Page transplanted a stationarity axiom from Koopmans' theory of impatience into Arrow's social choice theory with an infinite horizon and showed that the Arrow axioms and stationarity lead to a dictatorship by the first generation. We prove that the negative implications of their stationarity axiom are more far-reaching: there is no Arrow social welfare function satisfying their stationarity axiom. We propose a more suitable stationarity axiom, and show that an Arrow social welfare function satisfies this modified version if and only if it is a lexicographic dictatorship where the generations are taken into consideration in chronological order.Multi-Profile Social Choice, Infinite-Horizon Intergenerational Choice, Lexicographic Dictatorships

    The Pazner-Schmeidler Social Ordering: A Defense

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    It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of a fixed bundle of divisible goods. The paper follows an approach to preference aggregation which relies only on interpersonally non-comparable preferences, and circumvents Arrow's impossibility by taking account of the shape of indifference curves. Social preferences can then be constructed and justified with fairness principles.social welfare, social choice, fairness, egalitarian-equivalencesocial welfare, public choice

    Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources

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    A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, we show how certain classes of deals are both sufficient and necessary to guarantee that a socially optimal allocation of resources will be reached eventually

    Approval Voting ion Dichotomous Preferences

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    The aim of this paper is to find normative foundations of Approval Voting. In order to show that Approval Voting is the only social choice function that satisfies anonymity, neutrality, strategy-proofness and strict monotonicity we rely on an intermediate result which relates strategy-proofness of a social choice function to the properties of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and monotonicity of the corresponding social welfare function. Afterwards we characterize Approval Voting by means of strict symmetry, neutrality and strict monotonicity and relate this result to May's Theorem. Finally, we show that it is possible to substitute the property of strict monotonicity by the one efficiency of in the second characterization.Approval Voting, Dichotomous Preferences, Social Choice Function, Social Welfare Function
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