Functioning, capability and the standard of living - an axiomatic approach

Yongsheng Xu

Economic Theory, 2002, vol. 20, issue 2, 387-399

Abstract: The standard of living of an agent is viewed as her capability of achieving various functionings (Sen, 1985, 1987). The agent is thus characterized by her capability set that consists of different functioning vectors. The task of measuring the standard of living of the agent formally is therefore to rank different capability sets. This paper explores the problem of ranking capability sets in terms of the standard of living offered to the agent. For this purpose, we consider capability sets that are non-degenerate, compact, comprehensive and convex subsets of the $n$-dimensional real space, propose several intuitively plausible properties for the ranking and give characterizations of some ranking rules.

Keywords: The standard of living; Capability; Functioning; Ranking capability sets in terms of the standard of living; Quasiordering. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D63 D71 D74 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-02-26
Note: Received: April 10, 2000; revised version: June 18, 2001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00199/papers/2020002/20200387.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joecth:v:20:y:2002:i:2:p:387-399

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().