The achievements and limitations of the classical theory of optimal labor-income taxation based on social welfare functions are now well known, although utilitarianism still dominates public economics. We review the recent interest that has arisen for broadening the normative approach and making...

In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we build social welfare functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information on individual preferences. Social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in...