1990/01/01 by Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Yongsheng Xu · 6 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Decision Sciences · #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
paper · doi:10.1017/s0770451800043955
openalex publication_date 1990/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Summary The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.