Equity Efficiency And Social Choice

This book presents Professor Campbell's recent work on social choice in economic environments. It addresses the standard social choice questions in the framework of welfare economics; with emphasis on the allocation of public and private goods. But it goes beyond the standard issues to prove fundamental theorems on efficiency and equity in public policy analysis. Arrow's impossibility theorem discloses some elementary conditions under which the Pareto criterion implies that the social welfare function is insensitive to the preferences of all but a single individual. It is proved here that any degree of sensitivity to individual preferences implies that the social welfare function is independent of the preferences of all but one person even if efficiency is not required in any degree. In this and other ways, the absence of meaningful efficiency-equity trade-offs is demonstrated. The framework is a conventional allocation space with standard economic restrictions on the nature of individual preferences. Classical impossibility theorems, including Arrow's are proved en route to the main results. The book will be of interest to academic economists, especially those working in social choice theory and economic theory.