Abstract
We provide a brief survey of some literature on intertemporal social choice theory in a multi-profile setting. As is well-known, Arrow’s impossibility result hinges on the assumption that the population is finite. For infinite populations, there exist non-dictatorial social welfare functions satisfying Arrow’s axioms and they can be described by their corresponding collections of decisive coalitions. We review contributions that explore whether this possibility in the infinite-population context allows for a richer class of social welfare functions in an intergenerational model. Different notions of stationarity formulated for individual and for social preferences are examined.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is dedicated to Nick Baigent in appreciation of his invaluable contribution to the academic community. We thank Yongsheng Xu and two referees for their thoughtful comments and suggestions for improvements. Financial support from a Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan for the Project on Economic Analysis of Intergenerational Issues (grant number 22000001), the Fonds de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture of Québec and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.
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Bossert, W., Suzumura, K. (2015). Multi-Profile Intertemporal Social Choice: A Survey. In: Binder, C., Codognato, G., Teschl, M., Xu, Y. (eds) Individual and Collective Choice and Social Welfare. Studies in Choice and Welfare. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46439-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46439-7_7
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