2019/03/18 by Edward J. Green, Green, Edward J.
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Economic Theory and Institutions #FOS: Economics and business #Political Theory and Influence #Theoretical Economics (econ.TH)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.07769
openalex publication_date 2019/03/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective preferences and also in terms of some notion of their objective interests. This paper provides a framework for evaluation of policies in terms of welfare criteria that combine these two considerations. Sufficient conditions are provided for such a criterion to imply the same ranking of social states as does Pareto's unanimity criterion. Sufficiency is proved via study of a community of agents with interdependent ordinal preferences.