Abstract
Kenneth Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 1963), one of the five “founding books” of the Public Choice movement, is a seminal work in social science. It reformulates the theory of social welfare in ordinal rather than cardinal terms; it demonstrates the power of an axiomatic approach to economic modeling; and it offers a new approach to traditional issues in democratic theory having to do with the nature of collective choice that has had enormous impact in political science, presaging later aspects of “economic imperialism” vis-à-vis the other social sciences. The key result in the book, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, is arguably the best known purely mathematical result in the social sciences. Directly inspiring a huge literature, including numerous axiomatic formulations that were more in the nature of characterization or existence results than impossibility theorems, Arrow’s work laid the reinvigorated foundations for the subfield of social choice and welfare that came to be exemplified in the journal of that same name. The impossibility theorem is also perhaps the most important of the many contributions which earned Arrow his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Arrow, K. (1963). Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley, First Edition, 1951; Second Edition, 1963.
Black, D. (1958). The Theory of Committees and Elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
John Craven, John (1992). Social Choice: A Framework for Collective Decisions and Individual Judgements. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Grofman, B. and Feld, S. (1988). “Rousseau’s general will: a condorcetian perspective.” American Political Science Review, 82(2): 567–576. (Reprinted in J.P. Johnston and H. Pasis (eds.) Representation and Electoral Systems: Canadian Perspectives. NJ: Prentice Hall of Canada, 1990. Translated and reprinted in abridged form as La volonte generale de Rousseau: perspective Condorceene. In P. Crepel and C. Gilain (eds.), des Actes du Colloque International Condorcet. Paris: Editions Minerve, 1989.)
Feld, S.L. and Grofman, B. (1992). “Who’s afraid of the big bad cycle?” Journal of Theoretical Politics, (2): 231–237.
Plott, C. (1976). “Axiomatic social choice theory: an overview and interpretation (in the workshop).” American Journal of Political Science, 20(3): 511–596.
Regenwetter, M., Adams, J., and Grofman, B. “On the condorcet efficiency of majority rule: an alternative view of majority cycles and social homogeneity.” Theory and Decision (forthcoming).
Saari, D. (1994). Geometry of Voting. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Uhlaner, C. and Grofman, B. (1985). “Metapreferences and reasons for stability in social choice: thoughts on broadening and clarifying the debate.” Theory and Decision, 19: 31–50.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Grofman, B. (2004). Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. In: Rowley, C.K., Schneider, F. (eds) The Encyclopedia of Public Choice. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-47828-4_36
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-47828-4_36
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-7923-8607-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-306-47828-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive