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...

We search for impartiality in the allocation of objects when monetary transfers are not possible. Our main focus is anonymity. The standard definition requires that if agents' names are permuted, their assignments should be permuted in the same way. Since no rule satisfies this definition in...

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...

In this paper we provide Impossibility Theorems for social welfare functionals. We adapt the method of proving the inevitability of dictatorial Bergson-Samuelson social welfare functions for fixed utility profiles developed in a paper by Robert P. Parks in 1976. With a little more from results...

This paper reviews recent research on the aggregation of heterogeneous time preferences. Main results are illustrated in simple Ramsey models with two or three agents who differ in their discount factors. We employ an intertemporal view on these models and argue that preferences of a decision...

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...

When evaluating well-being distributions in an anonymous (and replication invariant) manner, one faces a dilemma between (i) assigning dictatorship to a single worst-off person, thus succumbing to a tyranny of non-aggregation and (ii) assigning dictatorship to (unboundedly) many better-off...

We study strategy-proof rules for choosing between two alternatives. We consider the full preference domain which allows for indifference. In this framework, for strategy proof rules, ontoness does not imply efficiency. We weaken the requirement of efficiency to ontoness and characterizes the...

In this paper, we show that in pure exchange economies where the number of goods equals or exceeds the number of agents, any Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof allocation mechanism always allocates the total endowment to some single agent even if the receivers vary.

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...