Roberts' "weak neutrality" or "weak welfarism" theorem concerns Sen social welfare functionals which are defined on an unrestricted domain of utility function profiles and satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, the Pareto condition, and a form of weak continuity. Roberts claimed that the induced welfare ordering on social states has a one-way representation by a continuous, monotonic real-valued function defined on the Euclidean space of interpersonal utility vectors. A counter-example shows that weak continuity is insufficient; a minor strengthening to pairwise continuity is proposed instead and its sufficiency demonstrated.
Journal of Economic Literature classification: D71
Keywords: social welfare functionals, weak welfarism.
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Paper provided by Stanford University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
99021.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Mongin, P & d'Aspremont, C, 1996.
"Utility Theory and Ethics,"
Papers
9632, Paris X - Nanterre, U.F.R. de Sc. Ec. Gest. Maths Infor..
Other versions:
MONGINÊ, Philippe & dÊASPREMONT, Claude, 1996.
"Utility theory and ethics,"
CORE Discussion Papers
1996063, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
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