Chapter Fourteen - The Informational Basis of Social Choiceprotect

Amartya Sen

Chapter 14 in Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, 2011, vol. 2, pp 29-46 from Elsevier

Abstract: Any procedure of social choice makes use of some types of information and ignores others. For example, the method of majority decision concentrates on people's votes, but pays no direct attention to, say, their social standings, or their prosperity or penury, or even the intensities of their preferences. The differences between distinct procedures lie, to a substantial extent, on the kind of information that each procedure uses and what it has to ignore. The informational bases of the different social choice procedures tell us a great deal about how they respectively work and what they can or cannot achieve.

Keywords: information; welfarism; voting; social welfare; impossibility theorems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
ISBN: 978-0-444-82914-6
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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