Two features of Arrow's social choice theory are critically scrutinized. The first feature is the welfarist-consequentialism, which not only bases social judgements about right or wrong actions on the assessment of their consequences, but also assesses consequences in terms of people's welfare...

In a recent paper to appear in Journal of Economic Theory [Kotaro Suzumura and Yongsheng Xe, "Characterizations of Consequentialism and Non-consequentialism"], an analytical framework was developed, which allowed us to characterize the concept of consequentialism and non-consequentialism. To...

We provide a necessary and a sufficient condition on an individual's expected utility function under which any zero-mean idiosyncratic risk increases cautiousness (the derivative of the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion), which is the key determinant for this individual's demand for...

It has been shown in the literature that if the individual consumers have constant but unequal time discount rates, then the representative consumer has discount rates that is a strictly decreasing function of time, just as is the case of hyperbolic discounting. No contribution, however, has so...

We investigate how an increase in transaction costs affect the equilibrium asset prices and allocations. We find a sufficient condition for an increase in transaction costs to increase buying prices, decrease selling prices, decrease the trading volume, and make all active traders worse off. The...

We generalize the classical expected-utility criterion by weakening transitivity to Suzumura consistency. In the absence of full transitivity, reflexivity and completeness no longer follow as a consequence of the system of axioms employed and a richer class of rankings of probability...

We analyze infinite-horizon choice functions within the setting of a simple technology. Efficiency and time consistency are characterized by stationary consumption and inheritance functions, as well as a transversality condition. In addition, we consider the equity axioms Suppes-Sen,...