TY - JOUR
T1 - Arrovian aggregation in economic environments
T2 - How much should we know about indifference surfaces?
AU - Fleurbaey, Marc
AU - Suzumura, Kotaro
AU - Tadenuma, Koichi
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank A. Leroux for a stimulating discussion, A. Trannoy and anonymous referees for helpful comments, and participants at seminars in Cergy, Rochester, Waseda and Hitotsubashi, and the fifth International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in Alicante. Financial supports from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan through Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research No.10045010 (“Economic Institutions and Social Norms: Evolution and Transformation”) and the 21st Century Center of Excellence Project on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems are gratefully acknowledged.
PY - 2005/9
Y1 - 2005/9
N2 - Arrow's celebrated theorem of social choice shows that the aggregation of individual preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individual preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental weak Pareto and non-dictatorship principles are violated. In the standard model of division of commodities, we investigate how much information about indifference surfaces is needed to construct social ordering functions satisfying the weak Pareto principle and anonymity. We show that local information such as marginal rates of substitution or the shapes "within the Edgeworth box" is not enough, and knowledge of substantially non-local information is necessary.
AB - Arrow's celebrated theorem of social choice shows that the aggregation of individual preferences into a social ordering cannot make the ranking of any pair of alternatives depend only on individual preferences over that pair, unless the fundamental weak Pareto and non-dictatorship principles are violated. In the standard model of division of commodities, we investigate how much information about indifference surfaces is needed to construct social ordering functions satisfying the weak Pareto principle and anonymity. We show that local information such as marginal rates of substitution or the shapes "within the Edgeworth box" is not enough, and knowledge of substantially non-local information is necessary.
KW - Independence of irrelevant alternatives
KW - Indifference surfaces
KW - Information
KW - Preference aggregation
KW - Social choice
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U2 - 10.1016/j.jet.2004.05.009
DO - 10.1016/j.jet.2004.05.009
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:23844477478
SN - 0022-0531
VL - 124
SP - 22
EP - 44
JO - Journal of Economic Theory
JF - Journal of Economic Theory
IS - 1
ER -