We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. In contrast to earlier contributions, we assign importance to the persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a class of individual intertemporal poverty measures reflecting this feature. In addition, we...

We employ the theory of rational choice to examine whether observable choices from feasible sets of prospects can be generated by the optimization of some underlying decision criterion under uncertainty. Rather than focusing on a specific theory of choice, our objective is to formulate a general...

We provide an axiomatic treatment of the measurement of economic insecurity, assuming that individual insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. The first component plays the role of a buffer stock to rely on in case of an adverse future event. The...

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical...

We analyze infinite-horizon choice functions within the setting of a simple linear technology. Time consistency and efficiency are characterized by stationary consumption and inheritance functions, as well as a transversality condition. In addition, we consider the equity axioms Suppes-Sen,...

Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on...

We consider a cooperative model of bargaining where the location of thedisagreement point may be uncertain. Based on the maximin criterion, we formulate anex ante effciency condition and characterize the class of bargaining solutions satisfyingthis axiom...

This paper illustrates the application of functional-equations results in population ethics.In an intertemporal framework, we provide characterizations of several classes of variablepopulationsocial orderings that may depend on individual lengths of life in addition tolifetime utilities...

We analyze the rationalizability of variable-population social-choice functions in a welfaristframework. It is shown that xed-population rationalizability and a weakening ofcongruence together are necessary and suffcient for rational choice, given a plausible dominanceproperty that prevents the...