Arrow's Impossibility Theorem is commonly understood to invoke a dictatorship that is somehow lurking within our voting arrangements. A well-recognized statement of the theorem is that "any constitution that respects transitivity, independence of irrelevant alternatives and unanimity is a...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...