Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice

Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura

Cahiers de recherche from Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative, CIREQ

Abstract: Ferejohn and Page transplanted a stationarity axiom from Koopmans’ theory of impatience into Arrow’s social choice theory with an infinite horizon and showed that the Arrow axioms and stationarity lead to a dictatorship by the first generation. We prove that the negative implications of their stationarity axiom are more far-reaching: there is no Arrow social welfare function satisfying their stationarity axiom. We propose a more suitable stationarity axiom, and show that an Arrow social welfare function satisfies this modified version if and only if it is a lexicographic dictatorship where the generations are taken into consideration in chronological order.

Keywords: Multi-Profile Social Choice; Infinite-Horizon Intergenerational Choice; Lexicographic Dictatorship (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Multi-profile intergenerational social choice (2011)
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2010)
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2009)
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2008)
Working Paper: Multi-Profile Intergenerational Social Choice (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mtl:montec:08-2008

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