Social Choice and Just Institutions: New Perspectives

It has become accepted that social choice is impossible in absence of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. This view is challenged here. Arrow obtained an impossibility theorem only by making unreasonable demands on social choice functions. With reasonable requirements, one can get very attractive possibilities and derive social preferences on the basis of non-comparable individual preferences. This new approach makes it possible to design optimal second-best institutions inspired by principles of fairness, while traditionally the analysis of optimal second-best institutions was thought to require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. In particular, this new approach turns out to be especially suitable for the application of recent philosophical theories of justice formulated in terms of fairness, such as equality of resources.social welfare, social choice, fairness, egalitarian-equivalence

Two Criteria for Social Decisions

This paper studies the ethical underpinnings of two social criteria which are prominent in the literature dealing with the problem of evaluating allocations of several consumption goods in a population with heteregenous preferences. The Pazner-Schmeidler criterion (Pazner-Schmeidler 1978) and the Walrasian criterion (Fleurbaey and Maniquet 1996) are prima facie quite different. But it is shown here that these criteria are related to close variants of the fairness condition that an allocation is better when every individual bundle in it dominates the average consumption in another allocation. In addition, the results suggest that the Pazner-Schmeidler criterion can be viewed as the best extension of the Walrasian criterion to non-convex economies.social welfare, social choice, fairness

Social choice and the indexing dilemma

This paper distinguishes an index ordering and a social ordering function as a simple way to formalize the indexing problem in the social choice framework. Two main conclusions are derived. First, the alleged dilemma between welfarism and perfectionnism is shown to involve a third possibility, exemplified by the fairness approach to social choice. Second, the idea that an individual is better off than another whenever he has more (goods, functionings...) in all dimensions, which is known to enter in conflict with the Pareto principle, can be partly salvaged by adopting the fairness approach.social choice, indexing, Pareto, well-being

Social Choice and Just Institutions:New Perspectives

It has become accepted that social choice is impossible in absence of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. This view is challenged here. Arrow obtained an impossibility theorem only by making unreasonable demands on social choice functions. With reasonable requirements, one can get very attractive possibilities and derive social preferences on the basis of non-comparable individual preferences. This new approach makes it possible to design optimal second-best institutions inspired by principles of fairness, while traditionally the analysis of optimal second-best institutions was thought to require interpersonal comparisons of well-being. In particular, this approach turns out to be especially suitable for the application of recent philosophical theories of justice formulated in terms of fairness, such as equality of resources.social choice, theories of justice

The Pazner-Schmeidler Social Ordering: A Defense

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

Universal Social Orderings

We propose the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The universal social ordering not only evaluates policy options for a given population but also compares social welfare across populations, as in international or intertemporal comparisons of living standards. It also makes it possible to evaluate policy options which affect the size of the population or the preferences of its members. We study how to extend the theory of social choice in order to select such orderings on a rigorous axiomatic basis. Key ingredients in this analysis are attitudes with respect to population size and the bases of interpersonal comparisons.social choice, universal social orderings, maximin principle, interpersonal comparisons

Do Irrelevant Commodities Matter?

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals' preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove impossibility results which suggest that such evaluations encounter difficulties when the objects of evaluation are allocations of ordinary commodities. We show how possibility results can be retrieved when the objects of evaluation are allocations of composite commodities, characteristics or human functionings.consumer preferences, social choice, irrelevant commodities, functionings

Compensation and responsibility

This a chapter for the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare. It deals with the theory of fairness applied to situations when individuals are partly responsible for their characteristics.fairness, responsibility, equal opportunity, compensation, handicap, talent, effort

Sharing the cost of a public good under nonnegativity constraints

We study the construction of a social ordering function for the case of a public good financed by contributions from the population, and we extend the analysis of Maniquet and Sprumont (2004) to the case when contributions cannot be negative, i.e. agents cannot receive subsidies from the others.social ordering, public good, maximin

Unfair inequalities in health and health care

Inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors. Measuring "unfair"inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading toethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimateinequalities. An example of the former could be life-style choices, an example of the latter issocial background. We show how to derive measures of unfair inequalities in health and in health care delivery from a structural model of health care and health production: “direct unfairness”, linked to the variations in medical expenditures and health in the hypothetical distribution in which all legitimate sources of variation are kept constant; “fairness gap”, linked to the differences between the actual distribution and the hypothetical distribution in which all illegitimate sources of variation have been removed. These two approaches are related to the theory of fair allocation. In general they lead to different results. We propose to analyse the resulting distributions with the traditional apparatus of Lorenz curves and inequality measures. We compare our proposal to the more common approach using concentration curves and analyse the relationship with the methods of direct and indirect standardization. We discuss how inequalities in health care can be integrated in an overall evaluation of social inequality.equity in health care delivery, health inequality, social welfare