Georges Bordes, Peter J. Hammond, and Michel Le Breton -- Social Welfare Functionals on Restricted Domains and in Economic Environments

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Abstract

March 1997

Arrow's ``impossibility'' and similar classical theorems are usually proved for an unrestricted domain of preference profiles. Recent work extends Arrow's theorem to various restricted but ``saturating'' domains of privately oriented, continuous, (strictly) convex, and (strictly) monotone ``economic preferences'' for private and/or public goods. For strongly saturating domains of more general utility profiles, this paper provides similar extensions of Wilson's theorem and of the strong and weak ``welfarism'' results due to d'Aspremont and Gevers and to Roberts. Hence, for social welfare functionals with or without interpersonal comparisons of utility, most previous classification results in social choice theory apply equally to strongly saturating economic domains.

Journal of Economic Literature classification: D71.

Keywords: social welfare functionals, Arrow's theorem, Wilson's theorem, welfarism, neutrality, restricted domains, economic domains, economic environments.