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....

We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences - that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

Multidimensional welfare analysis has recently been revived by money-metric measures based on explicit fairness principles and the respect of individual preferences. To operationalize this approach, preference heterogeneity can be inferred from the observation of individual choices (revealed...

In this paper we are concerned with the following question. Given an extended preference ordering under what conditions does there exist an empirical stochastic/social choice function which generates it? We use Farkas' lemma to obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which such a...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

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...

Fuzzy set theory has been explicitly introduced to deal with vagueness and ambiguity. One can also use probability theory or techniques borrowed from philosophical logic. In this chapter, we consider fuzzy preferences and we survey the literature on aggregation of fuzzy preferences. We restrict...

A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...

We characterize a new quasi-ordering on the collection of opportunity (or choice) sets. This new rule combines two criteria: the individual preferences on the universal set of options and the number of maximal options in the opportunity set. This new rule is compared with the indirect utility...

We introduce the concept of a social choice functional and provide two axiomatic characterizations of the utilitarian social choice functional. Subsequently we consider Harsanyi's weighted utilitarianism and establish two more propositions concerning the same. While the first is an axiomatic...