This paper develops a model of monetary policy in which the central banker can acquire costly information about a supply shock. It is shown that, with this assumption, it may be optimal for society to delegate to a "weight-liberal" central banker, a result which contrasts with that of Rogoff...

This chapter is concerned with issues arising from the construction of ethical measures of inequality and poverty. The recent literature on measurement of inequality and poverty emphasizes the close connection between social welfare functions and ethical indices of inequality and poverty. This...

This chapter provides a survey of utilitarian theories of justice. We review and discuss axiomatizations of utilitarian and generalized-utilitarian social-evaluation functionals in a welfarist framework. Section 2 introduces, along with some basic definitions, social-evaluation functionals....

This chapter reviews the SWFL approach to social choice. It does not attempt to be a complete and systematic survey of existing results, but to give a critical assesment of the main axioms and their role in filtering the ethically relevant information, in particular the measurability and...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

In this chapter, we seek to review some of the central concepts and results in the literature on positionalist voting rules, which goes back to Borda (1781) . After the introduction of the basic notation and definitions in earlier parts of the chapter, we explore in Section 3 the distinction...

The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. If a mechanism has the property that, in each possible state of the world, the set of equilibrium outcomes...

This chapter discusses different types of domain restrictions. We begin by analyzing various qualitative conditions on preference profiles. Value-restricted preferences (with single-peaked preferences as one of its subcases), limited agreement as well as antagonistic and dichotomous preferences...