This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani ([6]) to societies with an infinite number of agents. First, a novel characterisation of the inegalitarian leximax social welfare relation is provided based on the Individual Benefit Principle, which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This result is surprising because the IBP has no obvious anti-egalitarian content. Second, it is shown that there exists no weakly complete social welfare relation that satisfies simultaneously the standard axioms of Finite Anonymity, Strong Pareto, and Weak Continuity, and a liberal principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.