The quest for benefit from existing wealth or by seeking privileged benefit through influence over policy is known as rent seeking. Much rent seeking activity involves government and political decisions and is therefore in the domain of political economy, although it can also take place in...

We prove the existence of arbitrary (resp., semicontinuous, continuous) utility representations for arbitrary (resp., semicontinuous, continuous) preorders satisfying some weakened Debreu order separability conditions. In this way we widely generalize a classical result for total preorders that...

We give new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarianism in the absence of the unrestricted domain assumption, examine independence of proposed axioms, and discuss connections between our axioms and the known ones.

Given n experts, a set X of alternative projects, and various classes of individual utility functions u1,...,un on X, we characterize collective utility functions (CUFs) of the form where [alpha]i are positive numbers.

We substantially weaken the traditional unrestricted domain assumption and give axiomatic characterizations of social welfare functionals representable by utility functions of the form , where is a utility profile specifying a concrete welfare situation, and W is a real-valued function belonging...