We provide an axiomatization of Yitzhaki’s index of individual deprivation. Our result differs from an earlier characterization due to Ebert and Moyes in the way the reference group of an individual is represented in the ...

This paper examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical-level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian and number-dampened families and ...

Social exclusion manifests itself in the lack of an individual’s access to functionings as compared to other members of society. Thus, the concept is closely related to deprivation. We view deprivation as having two basic ...

Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different ...

This paper, which is to be published as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, provides an introduction to social-choice theory with interpersonal comparisons of well-being. We argue that the most promising ...

Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing ...

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 ...

Consistency, a natural weakening of transitivity introduced in a seminal contribution by Suzumura (1976b), has turned out to be an interesting and promising concept in a variety of areas within economic theory. This paper ...

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 ...

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. ...