Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice

Abstract

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