Harmless Homotopic Dictators

Nicholas Baigent ()
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Nicholas Baigent: Graz University

A chapter in Rational Choice and Social Welfare, 2008, pp 25-33 from Springer

Abstract: This paper constructs continuous Paretian social welfare functions for which one agent is a homotopic dictator but another is, in a precise sense, almost all powerful. The significance of this arises from the widely differing views1 that have been expressed about a theorem in Chichilnisky (1982) showing that, for all continuous Paretian social welfare functions there must be a homotopic dictator. What the analysis in this paper therefore shows is that Chichilnisky’s theorem is not a genuine Arrow-type impossibility theorem in the sense that desirable properties are not shown to entail some undesirable concentration of power.

Date: 2008
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-540-79832-3_2

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79832-3_2

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