Fair social orderings when agents have unequal production skills

We develop an approach which escapes Arrow’s impossibility by relying on information about agents’ indifference curves instead of utilities. In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we characterize social ordering functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information about individual preferences. These social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in skills, and equal access to resources for all preferences. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2005