There are a number of single-profile impossibility theorems in social choice theory and welfare economics that demonstrate the incompatibility of dominance criteria with various nonconsequentialist principles given some rationality restrictions on the rankings being considered. This article is...

In the very general setting of Armstrong (1980) for Arrow's Theorem, I show two results. First, in an infinite society, Anonymity is inconsistent with Unanimity and Independence if and only if a domain for social welfare functions satisfies a modest condition of richness. While Arrow's axioms...

This chapter discusses different types of domain restrictions. We begin by analyzing various qualitative conditions on preference profiles. Value-restricted preferences (with single-peaked preferences as one of its subcases), limited agreement as well as antagonistic and dichotomous preferences...

Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic...

In a recent edition of Perspectives on Politics, Larry Bartels examines the high levels of support for tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001. In so doing, he characterizes the opinions of “ordinary people” as being based on “simple-minded and sometimes misguided considerations...

This paper, prepared for the Handbook of Income Distribution (edited by A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon), reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential...

There is no consensus on how to measure interpersonally comparable, cardinal utility. Despite of this, people repeatedly make welfare evaluations in their everyday lives. However, people do not always agree on such evaluations, and this is one important reason for political disagreements. Thus,...

Though the social choice of social institutions or social results is impossible there is, strictly speaking, no social choice individual evaluations of social institutions or results trivially are possible. Such individual evaluations can be deemed liberal either because they emphasize political...

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This paper develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science - population and variable. Starting with the simplest case...

We explore the complementarities between high-skill emigration and poverty in developing countries. We build a model endogenizing human-capital accumulation, high-skill migration and productivity. Two countries sharing the same characteristics may end up either in a "low poverty/low brain drain"...