This chapter provides a survey of utilitarian theories of justice. We review and discuss axiomatizations of utilitarian and generalized-utilitarian social-evaluation functionals in a welfarist framework. Section 2 introduces, along with some basic definitions, social-evaluation functionals....

This chapter is concerned with issues arising from the construction of ethical measures of inequality and poverty. The recent literature on measurement of inequality and poverty emphasizes the close connection between social welfare functions and ethical indices of inequality and poverty. This...

Voting procedures focus on the aggregation of individuals' preferences to produce collective decisions. In practice, a voting procedure is characterized by ballot responses and the way ballots are tallied to determine winners. Voters are assumed to have clear preferences over candidates and...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

In this chapter we adopt the axiomatic approach in order to find (new) voting procedures to committees that are immune against deviations by coalitions of voters. We shall now describe our approach. Let G be a committee and let A be a finite set of m alternatives, m [greater-or-equal, slanted]...

In this chapter, we seek to review some of the central concepts and results in the literature on positionalist voting rules, which goes back to Borda (1781). After the introduction of the basic notation and definitions in earlier parts of the chapter, we explore in Section 3 the distinction...

The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. If a mechanism has the property that, in each possible state of the world, the set of equilibrium outcomes...

Within the framework of the axiomatic approach three types of voting schemes are investigated according to the form in which the individual opinions about the alternatives are defined, as well as to the form of desired social decision. These types of rules are Social Decision Rules, Functional...

This chapter discusses different types of domain restrictions. We begin by analyzing various qualitative conditions on preference profiles. Value-restricted preferences (with single-peaked preferences as one of its subcases), limited agreement as well as antagonistic and dichotomous preferences...