This paper describes the rebirth of the utilitarian approach, with the social welfare function a là Bentham, after the crisis due to the emergence of the ordinalist microeconomic analysis. It is shown that Vickrey in 1945 had already anticipated the themes developed earlier by Harsanyi and...

The paper studies optimal income taxation in a model with labor supply responses at the intensive and the extensive margin. It is shown that a utilitarian desire for redistribution does not pin down the sign of the optimal marginal tax rate: labor supply may be downward distorted, undistorted,...

The paper addresses intergenerational and intragenerational equity in an overlapping generation economy. We aim at defining an egalitarian distribution of a constant stream of resources, when preferences are ordinal and non-comparable. We establish the impossibility of efficiently distributing...