• DOI:10.2307/2297061
• Corpus ID: 54924865

Equity and the Informational Basis of Collective Choice

@article{dAspremont1977EquityAT,
  title={Equity and the Informational Basis of Collective Choice},
  author={Claude d'Aspremont and Louis Gevers},
  journal={The Review of Economic Studies},
  year={1977},
  volume={44},
  pages={199-209}
}

• C. d'Aspremont, L. Gevers
• Published 1 June 1977
• Economics
• The Review of Economic Studies

We consider the problem of a planner or ethical observer who wants to derive a collective preference ordering over a set of feasible alternatives from the knowledge of individual utility functions. By assumption, he is concerned with social welfare judgements, not with committee decisions. As a tool of analysis, we use the concept of social welfare functional (SWFL), which was developed by Sen [9] on foundations originally laid down by Arrow [1]. Rather than to compare SWFL’s directly, we treat them somewhat like composite goods and we compare sets of axioms which characterize them. We select five such sets, which differ mainly with respect to the planner’s informational basis. This term refers to an “invariance” axiom which defines in each case the measurability and comparability properties of individual utility functions. Taking up a suggestion of Sen’s [10], we focus our attention on the implications of each informational basis for the equity content of collective choice. Our study does not treat all possible invariance axioms; it does not even exhaust all the most relevant ones. However, we think that it brings about some logical clarification. Among other things, we characterize utilitarianism and the leximin (or lexical maximin) principle by means of two sets of axioms which differ only in one respect, viz. the invariance axiom. The paper is divided into three sections. In Section 1 we describe our problem formally, we discuss our invariance axioms, and we show that some of them are equivalent, in the light of the Review of Economic Studies, 44(2), 199-209, 1977. On this distinction, see Sen [11].