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...

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...

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...