 Universal social welfare orderings and riskMarc Fleurbaey and Stéphane Zuber Journal of Economic Theory, 2025, vol. 226, issue C Abstract: How can social prospects be evaluated and compared when there may be a risk on i) the actual allocations that people will receive, ii) the existence of these future people, and iii) their preferences? This paper investigates this question, which can arise when considering policies, such as climate policy, that affect people who do not yet exist. We start from the observation that there is no social ordering that meets minimal requirements of fairness, social rationality, and respect for people's ex ante preferences. We explore three ways around this impossibility. First, if we drop the ex ante Pareto requirement, we can obtain fair ex post criteria that take an (arbitrary) expected utility of an equally-distributed equivalent level of well-being. Second, if the social ordering is not an expected utility, we can obtain fair ex ante criteria that evaluate uncertain individual prospects with a certainty-equivalent measure of well-being. Third, if we accept that interpersonal comparisons rely on VNM utility functions even in absence of risk, we can construct expected utility social orderings that satisfy a version of Pareto ex ante. Keywords: Fairness; Social risk; Intergenerational equity (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:226:y:2025:i:c:s0022053125000602 DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2025.106014 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier |
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