IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/eee/socchp/1-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Impossibility theorems in the arrovian framework

In: Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare

Author

Listed:
  • Campbell, Donald E.
  • Kelly, Jerry S.

Abstract

Given a set of outcomes that affect the welfare of the members of a group, K.J. Arrow imposed the following five conditions on the ordering of the outcomes as a function of the preferences of the individual group members, and then proved that the conditions are logically inconsistent:- The social choice rule is defined for a large family of assignments of transitive orderings to individuals.- The social ordering itself is always transitive.- The social choice rule is not dictatorial. (An individual is a dictator if the social ordering ranks an outcome x strictly above another outcome y whenever that individual strictly prefers x to y.)- If everyone in the group strictly prefers outcome x to outcome y, then x should rank strictly above y in the social ordering.- The social ordering of any two outcomes depends only on the way that the individuals in the group order those same two outcomes.The chapter proves Arrow's theorem and investigates the possibility of uncovering a satisfactory social choice rule by relaxing the conditions while remaining within the Arrovian framework, which is identified by the following five characteristics:- The outcome set is unstructured.- The society is finite and fixed.- Only information about the ordering of the outcome set is used to convey information about individual welfare.- The output of the social choice process is an ordering of the outcome set.- Strategic play by individuals is not considered.

Suggested Citation

  • Campbell, Donald E. & Kelly, Jerry S., 2002. "Impossibility theorems in the arrovian framework," 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 1, pages 35-94, Elsevier.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socchp:1-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P65-4FFPH86-5/2/34e9364215e8e858c9cc8804346f5699
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I0 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - General

    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:eee:socchp:1-01. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookseriesdescription.cws_home/BS_HE/description .

    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.