Several "Paretian" welfare rules are equivalent when policymakers know agents' characteristics, e.g., a policy is optimal if (a) any other policy making someone better off harms some agent, or (b) it is the maximum of some social welfare function. This paper extends these and other rules to...

We show that d'Aspremont and Gevers' (1977) characterization of utilitarianism can be strengthened by dropping the condition of transitivity of the social preference relation while slightly strengthening the Anonymity condition. The Anonymity condition we use is weaker, however, than the...

The paper proposes the consistent and rigorous use of equivalence scales for households of different size. Equivalence scales are employed for deriving the income of an equivalent adult representing the household and for weighting the different household types. The proceeding takes into account...