Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice

Walter Bossert () and Kotaro SUZUMURA

Cahiers de recherche from Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques

Abstract: Ferejohn and Page transplanted a stationarity axiom from Koopmans’ theory of impatience into Arrow’s social choice theory with an infinite horizon and showed that the Arrow axioms and stationarity lead to a dictatorship by the first generation. We prove that the negative implications of their stationarity axiom are more far-reaching: there is no Arrow social welfare function satisfying their stationarity axiom. We propose a more suitable stationarity axiom, and show that an Arrow social welfare function satisfies this modified version if and only if it is a lexicographic dictatorship where the generations are taken into consideration in chronological order.

Keywords: Multi-Profile Social Choice; Infinite-Horizon Intergenerational Choice; Lexicograic Dictatorshi. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
Date: 2008

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http://hdl.handle.net/1866/2529 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2009)
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2008)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montde:2008-08

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