Social choice theory critically assesses and rationally designs economic mechanisms for improving human well-being. Kotaro Suzumura—one of the world’s foremost thinkers in social choice theory and welfare economics—fuses abstract ideas with real-world economies to examine foundational...

We study how to evaluate allocations independently of individual preferences over unavailable commodities. We prove impossibility results that suggest that such evaluations encounter serious difficulties. This is related to the well known problem of performing international comparisons of...

We introduce the concept of a universal social ordering, defined on the set of pairs of an allocation and a preference profile of any finite population. It is meant to unify evaluations and comparisons of welfare (living standards) for individuals and populations of possibly different sizes and...