Generalized median social welfare functions

✍ Scribed by Walter Bossert; John A. Weymark

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 1002 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0176-1714
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00187430

✦ Synopsis

The article considers the construction of social welfare functions when the set of alternatives is the two-dimensional nonnegative orthant, as would be the case if there are two divisible public goods which can be consumed in any nonnegative quantities. With individual and social preferences required to be linear and strictly monotonic, but otherwise unrestricted, we characterize all of the social welfare functions which satisfy binary independence of irrelevant alternatives and anonymity and which satisfy binary independence of irrelevant alternatives, anonymity, and weak Pareto. These classes of social welfare functions are shown to be formally equivalent to the classes of social choice functions characterized by Moulin in his study of strategy-proof social choice with singlepeaked preferences. * We are grateful to Charles Blackorby, Herv6 Moulin, and an anonymous referee for their comments.