An Impossibility Result for Social Welfare Relations in Infinitely-lived Societies

Michele Lombardi and Roberto Veneziani

Global COE Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series from Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University

Abstract: This paper extends the analysis of liberal principles in social choice recently proposed by Mariotti and Veneziani ([6]) to societies with an infinite number of agents. First, a novel characterisation of the inegalitarian leximax social welfare relation is provided based on the Individual Benefit Principle, which incorporates a liberal, non-interfering view of society. This result is surprising because the IBP has no obvious anti-egalitarian content. Second, it is shown that there exists no weakly complete social welfare relation that satisfies simultaneously the standard axioms of Finite Anonymity, Strong Pareto, and Weak Continuity, and a liberal principle of Non-Interference that generalises IBP.

Keywords: Infinite utility streams; Individual Benefit Principle; leximax; Non-Interference; impossibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D70 Q01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-07
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hst:ghsdps:gd09-077

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