In this paper, we study consumption decisions under risk assuming a prioritarian social welfare function, namely a concave transformation of individual utility functions. Under standard assumptions, there is always more current consumption under ex ante prioritarianism than under utilitarianism. Thus, a concern for equity (in the ex ante prioritarian sense) means less concern for the risky futu...

Optimal policy rules—including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities—are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and externalities are heterogeneous. When preference differences are observable, standard second-best result...

This paper proposes a theory of optimal taxation using the tax reform approach and generalized social marginal welfare weights to capture social preferences for redistribution. A tax system is optimal if no budget neutral small reform can increase a weighted sum of (money metric) gains and losses across individuals. However, the weights used for aggregating gains and losses are not derived from...

The mainly used welfare criterion in the social network literature is Bentham ́s utilitarian concept. The shortcomings of this concept are well-known. We compare the outcomes of the utilitarian concept with the Nash social welfare function. By using a Taylor approximation we deduce a formula which allows the direct comparison of both concepts. The implications of welfare considerations of import...

This note shows that for two inequality averse social welfare functions, if one is more inequality averse than the other, the household preference induced by optimally allocating aggregate bundles according to this social welfare function is more risk averse than the other. We present examples showing that this comparative static can be reversed if inequality aversion is dropped. We show that t...

public participation in urban decision-making process is one of the main elements of a democratic system, which can help establish balance and harmony between different sections of the society. this paper mainly aims to study the effect of economic and social welfare on the degree of citizen participation in urban affairs. our main hypothesis emphasizes that there is a strong positive correlati...

Applying Weglorz’ models of set theory without the axiom of choice, we investigate Arrow-type social welfare functions for infinite societies with restricted coalition algebras. We show that there is a reasonable, nondictatorial social welfare function satisfying “finite discrimination”, if and only if in Weglorz’ model there is a free ultrafilter on a set representing the individuals. AMS-subj...

We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow’s classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull over some finite set of alternatives. Individual and collective preferences are assumed to be continuous and convex, which guarantees the existence of maximal elements and the consistency of choice functions that retu...

We present a logic of social welfare functions. The logical language is syntactically simple, but expressive enough to express interesting and complicated properties of social welfare functions involving, e.g., quantification over both preference relations and over individual alternatives, such as Arrow’s thorem.