Liberal approaches to ranking infinite utility streams: when can we avoid interference?

In this work we analyse social welfare relations on sets of finite and infinite utility streams that satisfy various types of liberal non-interference principles. Earlier contributions have established that (finitely) anonymous and strongly Paretian quasiorderings exist that verify non-interference axioms together with weak preference continuity and further consistency. Nevertheless Mariotti and Veneziani (<CitationRef CitationID="CR16">2011</CitationRef>) prove that a fully liberal non-interfering view of a finite society leads to dictatorship if the weak Pareto principle is imposed. We first prove that this impossibility result vanishes when we extend the horizon to infinity. Then we investigate a related problem: namely, the possibility of combining “standard” semicontinuity with efficiency in the presence of non-interference. We provide several impossibility results that prove that there is a generalised incompatibility between relaxed forms of continuity and non-interference principles, both under ordinal and cardinal views of the problem. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013