This article reconsiders the Harsanyi--Sen debate concerning whether Harsanyi is justified in interpreting his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems as providing axiomatizations of utilitarianism. Sen's criticism and its formalization by Weymark are based on the claim that von...

This article considers the ranking of profiles of opportunity sets on the basis of their equality. A version of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle that is appropriate for the measurement of opportunity inequality is introduced and used to axiomatize the class of generalized Gini equality of...

The axioms used to characterize the generalized Gini social evaluation orderings for one-dimensional distributions are extended to the multidimensional attributes case. A social evaluation ordering is shown to have a two-stage aggregation representation if these axioms and a separability...

In the past quarter century, there has been a dramatic shift of focus in social choice theory, with structured sets of alternatives and restricted domains of the sort encountered in economic problems coming to the fore. This article provides an overview of some of the recent contributions to...

Comparative static properties of the solution to an optimal nonlinear income tax problem are provided for a model in which the government both designs an income tax schedule for redistributive purposes and provides a public good optimally. There are two types of individuals, distinguished by...

This article considers measures of individual welfare change for projects that change the state distribution of prices and incomes. For a consumer whose preferences satisfy the expected utility hypothesis, we investigate whether there is an increasing function of the state-contingent...

A social choice function satisfies the tops-only property if the chosen alternative only depends on each person's report of his most-preferred alternatives on the range of this function. On many domains, strategy-proofness implies the tops-only property, provided that the range of the social...

This article provides an introduction to the normative approach to multidimensional inequality measurement. Multivariate generalizations of the procedures used to construct univariate inequality indices from social evaluation orderings are described. Axiomatizations of multivariate Atkinson,...

James Buchanan (Economica, 1966) has argued that Alfred Marshall's theory of jointly-supplied goods can be extended to analyze the allocation of impure public goods. This article introduces a way of modelling sharing technologies for jointly-supplied goods that captures the essential features of...

Diamond and Mirrlees have shown that public sector shadow prices should be set equal to the private producer prices in some circumstances even if taxes are not optimal when the public production technology is convex and some of the private sector firms have constant-returns-to-scale...