Low-Distortion Social Welfare Functions

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...

Integer Programming and Arrovian Social Welfare Functions

We characterize the class of Arrovian Social Welfare Functions (ASWFs) as integer solutions to a collection of linear inequalities. Many of the classical possibility, impossibility, and characterization results can be derived in a simple and unified way from this integer program. Among the new results we derive is a characterization of preference domains that admit a nondictatorial, neutral ASW...