Multidimensional welfare aggregation

Public Choice 119:119-142 (2004)
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Abstract

Most accounts of welfare aggregation in the tradition of Arrow's and Sen's social-choice-theoretic frameworks represent the welfare of an individual in terms of a single welfare ordering or a single scalar-valued welfare function. I develop a multidimensional generalization of Arrow's and Sen's frameworks, representing individual welfare in terms of multiple personal welfare functions, corresponding to multiple 'dimensions' of welfare. I show that, as in the one-dimensional case, the existence of attractive aggregation procedures depends on certain informational assumptions, specifically about the measurability of welfare and its comparability not only across individuals but also across dimensions. I state several impossibility and possibility results. Under Arrow-type conditions, insufficient comparability across individuals leads to dictatorship of a single individual, while insufficient comparability across dimensions leads to dominance of a single dimension. Given sufficient comparability both across individuals and across dimensions, a range of possibilities emerges. I discuss the substantive implications of the results.

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Christian List
Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München

Citations of this work

Totalism without Repugnance.Jacob M. Nebel - 2022 - In Jeff McMahan, Tim Campbell, James Goodrich & Ketan Ramakrishnan (eds.), Ethics and Existence: The Legacy of Derek Parfit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 200-231.
Social Choice Theory.Christian List - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Incommensurability in Population Ethics.Jacob Nebel - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Oxford
The Necessity of Commensuration Bias in Grant Peer Review.Remco Heesen - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8 (39):423--443.

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