Excessivist Social Welfare: An Axiomatic Characterization and Application

Vito De Sandi () and Federico Fiorani ()

No 919, LIS Working papers from LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg

Abstract: This paper develops an axiomatic characterization of excessivist social welfare orderings, a class of welfare criteria inspired by limitarianism. The central idea is that income has positive social value only up to a richness threshold; above that line, further income increases reduce social welfare. The paper characterizes additive generalized-utilitarian orderings in which individual income is evaluated through a single-peaked function: increasing below the richness line and decreasing above it. The characterization relies on continuity, anonymity, separability, a restricted Pareto principle below the threshold, aversion to excessive richness, threshold-preserving Pigou- Dalton transfers, and ratio-scale invariance. An empirical illustration using LIS data for six European countries shows that the excessivist criterion can generate rankings that differ from standard utilitarian and inequality-adjusted welfare measures, especially when the richness line is treated as a moving relative benchmark or as an anchored real-income threshold.

JEL-codes: D31 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2026-05
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lis:liswps:919

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