[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/wpaper/247.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Social Choice Theory and the Informational Basis Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin Roberts
Abstract
For over a quarter of a century, the use of utility information based upon interpersonal comparisons has been seen as an escape route from the Arrow Impossibility Theorem. This paper critically examines this informational basis approach to social choice. Even with comparability of differences and levels, feasible social choice rules must be insensitive to a range of distributional issues. Also, the Pareto principle is not solely to blame for the inability to adopt rules combining utility and non-utility information: if the Pareto principle is not invoked then there is no way of combining utility and non-utility information in a ranking of states unless levels of utility are comparable; with level comparability, information can be combined only in restrictive ways and the notion of giving different independent weight to different considerations is ruled out. If informational bases are viewed as the restriction on information that is available, rather than a theoretical limit on information, then there exist methods to estimate richer informational structures and overcome these difficulties.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin Roberts, 2005. "Social Choice Theory and the Informational Basis Approach," Economics Series Working Papers 247, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:247
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:7c08bf53-352a-48b1-907f-2f23b9f64ade
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kevin W. S. Roberts, 1980. "Interpersonal Comparability and Social Choice Theory," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 47(2), pages 421-439.
    2. Sen, Amartya, 1970. "Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 38(3), pages 393-409, May.
    3. Basu, Kaushik, 1983. "Cardinal utility, utilitarianism, and a class of invariance axioms in welfare analysis," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 193-206, December.
    4. Gevers, Louis, 1979. "On Interpersonal Comparability and Social Welfare Orderings," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 47(1), pages 75-89, January.
    5. Deschamps, Robert & Gevers, Louis, 1978. "Leximin and utilitarian rules: A joint characterization," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 143-163, April.
    6. Sen, Amartya K, 1979. "Personal Utilities and Public Judgements: Or What's Wrong with Welfare Economics?," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 89(355), pages 537-558, September.
    7. Amartya Sen, 1999. "The Possibility of Social Choice," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 349-378, June.
    8. Sen, Amartya K, 1977. "On Weights and Measures: Informational Constraints in Social Welfare Analysis," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(7), pages 1539-1572, October.
    9. Kevin W. S. Roberts, 1980. "Possibility Theorems with Interpersonally Comparable Welfare Levels," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 47(2), pages 409-420.
    10. Wilson, Robert, 1972. "Social choice theory without the Pareto Principle," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 478-486, December.
    11. Kevin W. S. Roberts, 1980. "Social Choice Theory: The Single-profile and Multi-profile Approaches," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 47(2), pages 441-450.
    12. Sen, Amartya & Pattanaik, Prasanta K., 1969. "Necessary and sufficient conditions for rational choice under majority decision," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 1(2), pages 178-202, August.
    13. Hammond, Peter J, 1976. "Equity, Arrow's Conditions, and Rawls' Difference Principle," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(4), pages 793-804, July.
    14. Marc Fleurbaey, 2003. "On the informational basis of social choice," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 21(2), pages 347-384, October.
    15. Robert P. Parks, 1976. "An Impossibility Theorem for Fixed Preferences: A Dictatorial Bergson-Samuelson Welfare Function," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 43(3), pages 447-450.
    16. Sen, Amartya, 1970. "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 78(1), pages 152-157, Jan.-Feb..
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Barry Dewitt & Alexander Davis & Baruch Fischhoff & Janel Hanmer, 2017. "An Approach to Reconciling Competing Ethical Principles in Aggregating Heterogeneous Health Preferences," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 37(6), pages 647-656, August.
    2. Sandro Ambuehl & B. Douglas Bernheim, 2021. "Interpreting the will of the people: social preferences over ordinal outcomes," ECON - Working Papers 395, Department of Economics - University of Zurich, revised Jan 2024.
    3. Sandro Ambuehl & B. Douglas Bernheim, 2021. "Interpreting the Will of the People: A Positive Analysis of Ordinal Preference Aggregation," NBER Working Papers 29389, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. d'Aspremont, Claude & Gevers, Louis, 2002. "Social welfare functionals and interpersonal comparability," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 459-541, Elsevier.
    2. Kotaro Suzumura, 2002. "Introduction to social choice and welfare," Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 442, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    3. Hirofumi Yamamura, 2017. "Interpersonal comparison necessary for Arrovian aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 49(1), pages 37-64, June.
    4. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter, 2004. "Interpersonal comparisons of well-being," Economic Research Papers 269605, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    5. John A Weymark, 2012. "Social Welfare Functions," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers vuecon-sub-13-00018, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    6. Yew‐Kwang Ng, 1981. "Bentham or Nash? On the Acceptable Form of Social Welfare Functions," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 57(3), pages 238-250, September.
    7. Elizabeth Maggie Penn, 2015. "Arrow’s Theorem and its descendants," Chapters, in: Jac C. Heckelman & Nicholas R. Miller (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, chapter 14, pages 237-262, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    8. Kui Ou-Yang, 2018. "Generalized rawlsianism," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 50(2), pages 265-279, February.
    9. Sakamoto, Norihito, 2020. "Equity Principles and Interpersonal Comparison of Well-being: Old and New Joint Characterizations of Generalized Leximin, Rank-dependent Utilitarian, and Leximin Rules," RCNE Discussion Paper Series 7, Research Center for Normative Economics, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    10. Ou-Yang, Kui, 2018. "Equity, hierarchy, and ordinal social choice," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 75-84.
    11. Kaminski, Marek M., 2004. "Social choice and information: the informational structure of uniqueness theorems in axiomatic social theories," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 121-138, September.
    12. Steven Pressman & Gale Summerfield, 2000. "The Economic Contributions of Amartya Sen," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1), pages 89-113.
    13. Vincenzo Atella & Jay Coggins & Federico Perali, 2005. "Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 2(2), pages 117-144, January.
    14. Charles Blackorby & Walter Bossert & David Donaldson, 2005. "Multi-profile welfarism: A generalization," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 24(2), pages 253-267, April.
    15. Nicolas Gravel & Brice Magdalou & Patrick Moyes, 2017. "Hammond’s Equity Principle and the Measurement of Ordinal Inequalities," Working Papers halshs-01430838, HAL.
    16. Christopher P. Chambers, 2009. "An Axiomatization Of Quantiles On The Domain Of Distribution Functions," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(2), pages 335-342, April.
    17. Yukinori Iwata, 2014. "On the informational basis of social choice with the evaluation of opportunity sets," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(1), pages 153-172, June.
    18. M. Kaneko, 1984. "On interpersonal utility comparisons," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 1(3), pages 165-175, October.
    19. Coggins, Jay S. & Perali, C. Federico, 1993. "Voting for Equity: Estimating Society's Preferences Toward Inequality," Staff Papers 200567, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics.
    20. Christopher Chambers, 2009. "Intergenerational equity: sup, inf, lim sup, and lim inf," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 32(2), pages 243-252, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social Choice; Informational Bases; Interpersonal Comparisons; Non-utility Information;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:247. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Pouliquen (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfeixuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.