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...

This paper analyzes social situations in the context of risk. A new argument is proposed in order to defend the ex-post approach against Diamond’s (1967) famous critique of Harsanyi’s (1955) utilitarian theorem. It leads to a characterization of the criterion consisting in computing the...

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...

An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue...

When well-being is one-dimensional, the key ethical issue for the definition of social welfare is the degree of inequality aversion, which can be discussed with variants of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle. When it is measured in terms of primary goods, functionings or capabilities,...

We investigate the problem of how to make welfare comparisons of income distributions hen a population allocation problem (how a population should be optimally divided over families for given resources) adds to the usual income allocation problem. Pro-family and anti-family stances are...

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...

Axiomatic bargaining theory (e.g., Nash’s theorem) is static. We attempt to provide a dynamic justification for the theory. Suppose a Judge or Arbitrator must allocate utility in a (infinite) sequence of two-person problems; at each date, the Judge is presented with a utility possibility set...