Social preferences for the evaluation of procedures

The standard analysis of procedures (mechanisms), in the theory of implementation, focuses on the properties of the subset of possible outcomes. But since a given procedure may yield very different outcomes in different circumstances (preference profile, information or rationality of players), it may be useful to rely on fine-grained social preferences over outcomes in order to evaluate the procedure. This paper introduces the notion of cross-profile social ordering, and illustrates how this concept may be used for the assessment of procedures.