Impartial utilitarianism on infinite utility streams

Kensei Nakamura

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: When evaluating policies that affect future generations, the most commonly used criterion is the discounted utilitarian rule. However, in terms of intergenerational fairness, it is difficult to justify prioritizing the current generation over future generations. This paper axiomatically examines impartial utilitarian rules over infinite-dimensional utility streams. We provide simple characterizations of the social welfare ordering evaluating utility streams by their long-run average in the domain where the average can be defined. Furthermore, we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions of the same axioms in a more general domain, the set of bounded streams. Some of these results are closely related to the Banach limits, a well-known generalization of the classical limit concept for streams. Thus, this paper can be seen as proposing an appealing subclass of the Banach limits by the axiomatic analysis.

Date: 2025-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04934 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2502.04934

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().