Anonymous Single-Profile Welfarism

Abstract

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized because of the limitations they impose on the possibility of formulating properties such as anonymity. We suggest an alternative definition of anonymity that applies in a single-profile setting and characterize anonymous single-profile welfarism under a richness assumption.