Roberts' Weak Welfarism Theorem: A Minor Correction

Working Papers from Stanford University, Department of Economics

Abstract: September 1999

Roberts' "weak neutrality" or "weak welfarism" theorem concerns Sen social welfare functionals which are defined on an unrestricted domain of utility function profiles and satisfy independence of irrelevant alternatives, the Pareto condition, and a form of weak continuity. Roberts claimed that the induced welfare ordering on social states has a one-way representation by a continuous, monotonic real-valued function defined on the Euclidean space of interpersonal utility vectors. A counter-example shows that weak continuity is insufficient; a minor strengthening to pairwise continuity is proposed instead and its sufficiency demonstrated.

Journal of Economic Literature classification: D71

Keywords: social welfare functionals, weak welfarism.

Keywords: social welfare functionals; weak welfarism (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 and nep-mic
Date: Written 1999-09
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp99021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stanford University, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Thomas Krichel ().