The Pareto efficiency criterion is often in conflict with the equity criteria as no-envy or as egalitarian-equivalence: An allocation x that is Pareto superior to another allocation y can be inferior to y in consideration of equity. This paper formalizes two differnet principles of social choice...

This paper considers two distinct procedures to lexicographically compose multiple criteria for social or individual decision making. The first procedure composes M binary relations into one, and then selects its maximal elements. The second procedure first selects the set of maximal elements of...

We propose the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of social states with populations of possibly different sizes with various characteristics. The...

When we construct social preferences, the Pareto principle is often in conflict with the equity criteria: there exist two allocations x and y such that x Pareto dominates y, but y is an equitable allocation whereas x is not. The efficiency-first principle requires to rank an allocation x higher...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations of allocations independently of individuals' preferences over unavailable commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods....

We analyze a society that cares about inequality of opportunity. We propose adynamic setting in which effort is a decision variable that individuals adopt as asolution of an explicit utility maximization program. Effort determines themonetary outcome and it depends on the individual¿s...

Economic change, while promoting innovation and growth, at the same time generates "gales of creative destruction". It is still largely unclear what this concept implies for the task of assessing welfare (and, correspondingly, the need for and scope of policy-making) in a novelty-generating,...

This paper is an assessment of the approach suggested by Gary Fields for measuring inequality in an economy with high-income sector enlargement. This approach describes the change in inequality according to a U-pattern, instead of the inverted U-pattern described by other indices. We argue that...

In this paper, we present graphical and quantitative evidence on the important role played by changes in labor market institutions on the rise in wage inequality in the United States during the 1980s. We show that the decline in the real value of the minimium wage and in the rate of unionization...

This paper revisits Diamond’s classical impossibility result regarding the ordering of infinite utility streams. We show that if no representability condition is imposed, there do exist strongly Paretian and finitely anonymous orderings of intertemporal utility streams with attractive...