IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/stanec/99021.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Roberts' Weak Welfarism Theorem: A Minor Correction

Author

Listed:
  • Peter J. Hammond

Abstract

September 1999 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter J. Hammond, 1999. "Roberts' Weak Welfarism Theorem: A Minor Correction," Working Papers 99021, Stanford University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:wop:stanec:99021
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp99021.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kevin W. S. Roberts, 1980. "Interpersonal Comparability and Social Choice Theory," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 47(2), pages 421-439.
    2. Georges Bordes & Peter J. Hammond & Michel Le Breton, 2005. "Social Welfare Functionals on Restricted Domains and in Economic Environments," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 7(1), pages 1-25, February.
    3. Ron Lavi & Ahuva Mu’alem & Noam Nisan, 2009. "Two simplified proofs for Roberts’ theorem," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 32(3), pages 407-423, March.
    4. Claude D'Aspremont & Louis Gevers, 1977. "Equity and the Informational Basis of Collective Choice," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 44(2), pages 199-209.
    5. Blackorby, Charles & Donaldson, David & Weymark, John A, 1984. "Social Choice with Interpersonal Utility Comparisons: A Diagrammatic Introduction," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 25(2), pages 327-356, June.
    6. P. Mongin & C. d'Aspremont, 1996. "Utility theory and ethics," THEMA Working Papers 96-32, THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
    7. Graciela Chichilnisky & Peter J. Hammond & Nicholas Stern, 2020. "Fundamental utilitarianism and intergenerational equity with extinction discounting," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 54(2), pages 397-427, March.
    8. Blackorby, Charles & Donaldson, David, 1982. "Ratio-Scale and Translation-Scale Full Interpersonal Comparability without Domain Restrictions: Admissible Social-Evaluation Functions," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 23(2), pages 249-268, June.
    9. Sen, Amartya K, 1977. "On Weights and Measures: Informational Constraints in Social Welfare Analysis," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 45(7), pages 1539-1572, October.
    10. John A. Weymark & Kai-yuen Tsui, 1997. "Social welfare orderings for ratio-scale measurable utilities," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 10(2), pages 241-256.
    11. Roberts, Kevin, 1983. "Social choice rules and real-valued representations," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 72-94, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mongin, Philippe, 2019. "Interview of Peter J. Hammond," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 1190, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    2. Yukinori Iwata, 2014. "On the informational basis of social choice with the evaluation of opportunity sets," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 43(1), pages 153-172, June.
    3. Georges Bordes & Peter J. Hammond & Michel Le Breton, 2005. "Social Welfare Functionals on Restricted Domains and in Economic Environments," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 7(1), pages 1-25, February.
    4. d'Aspremont, Claude & Gevers, Louis, 2002. "Social welfare functionals and interpersonal comparability," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 459-541, Elsevier.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. d'Aspremont, Claude & Gevers, Louis, 2002. "Social welfare functionals and interpersonal comparability," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 10, pages 459-541, Elsevier.
    2. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter, 2004. "Interpersonal comparisons of well-being," Economic Research Papers 269605, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    3. Charles Blackorby & Walter Bossert & David Donaldson, 2005. "Multi-profile welfarism: A generalization," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 24(2), pages 253-267, April.
    4. Hirofumi Yamamura, 2017. "Interpersonal comparison necessary for Arrovian aggregation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 49(1), pages 37-64, June.
    5. Weymark, John A., 1998. "Welfarism on economic domains1," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 251-268, December.
    6. John A Weymark, 2012. "Social Welfare Functions," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers vuecon-sub-13-00018, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    7. Kaminski, Marek M., 2004. "Social choice and information: the informational structure of uniqueness theorems in axiomatic social theories," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 121-138, September.
    8. Basu, Kaushik & Mitra, Tapan, 2007. "Utilitarianism for infinite utility streams: A new welfare criterion and its axiomatic characterization," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 350-373, March.
    9. Bossert, Walter, 1996. "The Kaldor compensation test and rational choice," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 265-276, February.
    10. Michael Morreau & John A Weymark, 2015. "Measurement Scales and Welfarist Social Choice," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 15-00008, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
    11. Walter Bossert & Kohei Kamaga, 2020. "An axiomatization of the mixed utilitarian–maximin social welfare orderings," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 69(2), pages 451-473, March.
    12. Sakamoto, Norihito, 2020. "Equity Principles and Interpersonal Comparison of Well-being: Old and New Joint Characterizations of Generalized Leximin, Rank-dependent Utilitarian, and Leximin Rules," RCNE Discussion Paper Series 7, Research Center for Normative Economics, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    13. Bossert, Walter, 1998. "Welfarism and rationalizability in allocation problems with indivisibilities1," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 133-150, March.
    14. Levin, Vladimir L., 2010. "On social welfare functionals: Representation theorems and equivalence classes," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 59(3), pages 299-305, May.
    15. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter & Donaldson, David, 1997. "Birth-Date Dependent Population Ethics: Critical-Level Principles," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 260-284, December.
    16. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter & Donaldson, David, 1996. "Leximin population ethics," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 31(2), pages 115-131, April.
    17. Marc Fleurbaey & Philippe Mongin, 2005. "The news of the death of welfare economics is greatly exaggerated," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 25(2), pages 381-418, December.
    18. Asheim, Geir B. & Buchholz, Wolfgang & Tungodden, Bertil, 2001. "Justifying Sustainability," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 252-268, May.
    19. Danan, Eric & Gajdos, Thibault & Tallon, Jean-Marc, 2013. "Aggregating sets of von Neumann–Morgenstern utilities," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(2), pages 663-688.
    20. Blackorby, Charles & Bossert, Walter & Donaldson, David, 1999. "Price-Independent Welfare Prescriptions and Population Size," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 111-119, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    social welfare functionals; weak welfarism;

    JEL classification:

    • D71 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:stanec:99021. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/destaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.