Suchergebnisse

Kenneth Arrow's treatment of social choice ("A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare," Journal of Political Economy, 1950, 58, 328-346) led to the formulation of his 'Impossibility Theorem', according to which it would be impossible for a society to ethically consider the preferences of all its members in formulating policies. By making certain changes in Arrow's assumptions, the contradictions he encountered can be avoided. Arguments are presented which arrive at a "social choice procedure that will translate judgments of preference priority into a social ordering." A determination of preference priority leads to a theorem very similar to John Rawls' difference principle (A THEORY OF JUSTICE, Cambridge, Mass: 1971) which recognizes the moral priority of those in the worst social position. Appendix. J. N. Mayer.

Arrow's paradox, important to the foundation of social choice theory & individual choice theory, was solved by reducing Arrow's rationality assumptions to acyclicity. Another paradox is presented which requires the abandonment of acyclicity as well. The construction of the paradox allows for certain intransitivities of individual indifference resulting from less than n significant one. The following are assumed: (1) the Citizens' intransitive weak preference, (2) the Strong Pareto Principle, & (3) Ternary acyclicity. The acceptance of the reasonableness of assumptions 1 & 2, forces the rejection of assumption 3; all of which is a fundamental change in the theory of social choice. S. Lupton.

The specifics of pubic choice under representative democracy are considered in the seventh chapter of the textbook. The factors of forming of coalitions in parliament are analyzed. The methods of voting manipulation including the formulation of Arrow's impossibility theorem are described. The concept of logrolling is distinguished. The chapter also includes further readings, control tests and questions.

We propose six axioms concerning when one candidate should defeat another in a democratic election involving two or more candidates. Five of the axioms are widely satisfied by known voting procedures. The sixth axiom is a weakening of Kenneth Arrow's famous condition of the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). We call this weakening Coherent IIA. We prove that the five axioms plus Coherent IIA single out a method of determining defeats studied in our recent work: Split Cycle. In particular, Split Cycle provides the most resolute definition of defeat among any satisfying the six axioms for democratic defeat. In addition, we analyze how Split Cycle escapes Arrow's impossibility theorem and related impossibility results.

Condorcet's paradox of voting and Arrow's impossibility theorem are by now well known. Inspired by Arrow's treatment of social choice, others have presented alternative proofs of his theorem and different impossibility results. Professor Fishburn has recently treated us to some interesting new voting paradoxes. It is important to have the area of inconsistency among the various treatments explored and clearly mapped out. It is equally important to come to terms with the known inconsistencies in order to construct a solid social choice edifice on safe ground. Coming to terms with the inconsistencies must surely mean deciding between alternative normative conditions when all of them cannot be satisfied simultaneously. This paper attempts to do just that by adding some computational criteria to the standard list of normative criteria and then singling out a subset as being more important (to the author at least) than the rest. Since the 'important' criteria are mutually consistent they can be used to derive some properties of democratic decision processes. Simple majority rule, applied in sequential elimination, is distinguished as the best collective decision method. It fails to satisfy the Pareto, or unanimity, criterion – one often regarded as a sine qua non of social choice – but when this condition is added to the author's list an impossibility result obtains. An argument is proposed to counter the suggestion that Pareto optimality be added to the list and some other condition removed.

If the class of admissible preference orderings is restricted in a manner appropriate for economic & political models, then K. J. Arrow's (Social Choice and Individual Values, New York: Wiley, 1963) impossibility theorem for social welfare function continues to be valid. Specifically, if the space of alternatives is R****, n(greater than or equal to) 3, where each dimension represents a different public good, & if each person's preferences are restricted to be convex, continuous, & strictly monotonic, then no social welfare function exists that satisfies unanimity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, & nondictatorship. 1 Figure. HA.

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his pathbreaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function—one of the main concepts of the new welfare economics as defined by Abram Bergson (Burk) in 1938 and clarified by Paul Samuelson in the Foundations of Economic Analysis—does not exist under reasonable conditions. Indeed, from the very start, Arrow kept asserting that his famous impossibility result has direct and devastating consequences for the Berg-son-Samuelson social welfare function, though he seemed to soften his position in the early eighties. On his side, especially from the seventies on, Samuelson remained active on this issue and continued to defend the concept he had devised with Bergson, tooth and nail, against Arrow's attacks. The aim of this article is precisely to examine this rather strange controversy, which is almost unknown in the scientific community, even though it lasted more than fifty years and involved a conflict between two economic giants, Arrow and Samuelson, and, behind them, two distinct communities—welfare economics, which was on the wane, against the emerging social choice theory—representing two conflicting ways of dealing with mathematical tools in welfare economics and two different conceptions of social welfare.