In a model where agents have unequal skills and heterogeneous preferences about consumption goods and leisure, this paper studies how to combine linear commodity taxes and non-linear income tax. It proposes a particular social welfare function on the basis of fairness principles. It then derives...

We propose the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations independently of individual preferences over non-consumed commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove...