Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR). Biblioteca Centrale / CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche

Internal consistency of choice has been a central concept in economics, decision theory, and social choice. This idea is essentially confused. We cannot determine whether a choice function is consistent without referring to something external to choice (e.g., objectives, values). The standard results have to be reexamined in this light. Kenneth J. Arrow's general possibility theorem is extended in this paper without demanding any internal consistency of social choice or any notion of 'social rationality.'

Recent developments in social theory are critically surveyed in the light of a categorization of interpersonal aggregation problems into four distinct types that seem to require varying treatment but typically do not receive it. Informational inadequacy of the usual social framework is discussed in this context. A fairly thorough exploration of the correspondences between consistency conditions for functions and regularity properties of the binary relation of preference leads to a re-examination of the class of impossibility results in social theory, necessitating reinterpretations of various theorems (including Arrow's). SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY is concerned with relationships between individuals' preferences and social choice (Fishburn (1973, p. 3)). But a great many problems fit this general description and they can be classified into types that are fundamentally different from each other. It can be argued that some of the difficulties in the general theory of social arise from a desire to fit essentially different classes of group aggregation problems into one uniform framework and from seeking excessive generality. An alternative is to classify these problems into a number of categories and to investigate the appropriate structure for each category. In a small way, this is what will be done in this paper, and some of the recent developments in the theory of social will be examined in that light.

[Regularity conditions in social welfare analysis can be seen as ways of making specific types of information "inadmissible" in welfare judgements: the evaluation is made invariant with respect to information of those types. In this sense, these conditions--often reflecting "principles" of judgement--serve also as informational constraints. In this lecture alternative approaches to social welfare evaluation are examined in this light. The analysis covers both Arrovian and Bergson--Samualsonian social welfare functions as well as principles underlying utilitarianism, Rawlsian conception of justice, notions of liberty and egality, and "historical" theories of rights and entitlements (e.g., Marx or Nozick).]

The primary aim of this paper is to propose a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use. An axiomatic approach is used to derive the measure. The conception of welfare in the axiom set is ordinal. The information requirement for the new measure is quite limited, permitting practical use.

[The object of this paper is to provide a systematic treatment of aggregation of individual welfare as a basis for social preference. Two polar cases of interpersonal comparability seem to have received all the attention in the literature so far. Either it is assumed that individual welfare measures are fully comparable, e.g., in Marshall [12], or that they are not comparable at all, e.g., in Robbins [15]. It is clear, however, that we frequently make judgments that are not consistent with noncomparability but which do not require full comparability. Part of the object of this paper is to examine the formal basis of such judgements and to develop a continuum of intermediate assumptions.]

Journal Article Choice Functions and Revealed Preference Get access Amartya K. Sen Amartya K. Sen University of Delhi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 38, Issue 3, July 1971, Pages 307–317, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296384 Published: 01 July 1971

Journal Article Labour Allocation in a Cooperative Enterprise Get access Amartya K. Sen Amartya K. Sen Delhi School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 33, Issue 4, October 1966, Pages 361–371, https://doi.org/10.2307/2974432 Published: 01 October 1966

Journal Article Preferences, Votes and the Transitivity of Majority Decisions Get access Amartya Kumar Sen Amartya Kumar Sen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 1964, Pages 163–165, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296199 Published: 01 April 1964