Most, if not at all, practitioners of welfare economics and social choice theory are presumed to be welfaristic in their conviction. Indeed, they evaluate the goodness of an economic policy and/or economic system in terms of the welfare that people receive at the culmination outcomes thereby...

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 ["Paretian Welfare Judgements and Bergsonian Social Choice," Economic Journal, Vol. 109, 1999, pp. 204-220], Suzumura proposed a possible way of relating the two schools of "new" welfare economics. According to his proposal, the logical possibility of the Paretian "new" welfare...

By allowing for the possibility that individuals recognize the intrinsic value of choice along with the instrumental value thereof, we suppose that individuals express extended preference orderings of the following type: Choosing an alternative x from an opportunity set A is better than choosing...

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...

A univariate real-valued function is said to be completely monotone if it takes positive values and alternate the signs of its higher order derivatives, starting from everywhere negative first derivatives. We prove that the representative consumer's discount factor of a continuous-time economy...

In a continuous-time economy with complete markets, we show how the heterogeneity in the individual consumers' risk attitudes and impatience would affect the representative consumer's counterparts. Specifically, our formulas tell us how his risk tolerance and impatience will change over time,...

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...