This chapter reviews the SWFL approach to social choice. It does not attempt to be a complete and systematic survey of existing results, but to give a critical assesment of the main axioms and their role in filtering the ethically relevant information, in particular the measurability and...

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...

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...

The equitable division of a joint cost (or a jointly produced output) among agents with different shares or types of output (or input) commodities, is a central theme of the theory of cooperative games with transferable utility. Ever since Shapley's seminal contribution in 1953, this question...

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...

This chapter presents a simple introduction to the main results in topological social choice theory. Given a continuous social welfare function, these results show the following: (i) Unanimity and Anonymity are incompatible; (ii) Weak Pareto and No Veto are incompatible; and (iii) Weak Pareto...

A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...