The curvature properties of social welfare functions

Piera Mazzoleni (), Elisa Pagani () and Federico Perali
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Piera Mazzoleni: Cattolica University of Milan
Elisa Pagani: University of Verona

No 493, Working Papers from ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality

Abstract: This paper characterizes the curvature properties of applied social welfare functions. We choose as an example a general and non-abbreviated social welfare function introduced by Jorgenson and Slesnick (1983) that is frequently used in empirical work. We investigate the regularity of social preferences necessary to maximize social welfare with respect to prices and to guarantee that the social welfare function is well-behaved and suitable for theoretically plausible microsimulations. We use the notion of generalized convexity to define the necessary conditions for the social welfare function to be convex with respect to prices.

Keywords: Generalized convexity; social welfare function; inequality aversion. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D30 D63 I31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2019-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2019-493

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