Ken Arrow (1998) asks, “What has economics to say about racial discrimination?” He replies – entirely correctly – that racial “segregation within an industry – that is, firms with either all black or all white labor forces” – may be explained by economic theory, but “the...

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of a fixed bundle of divisible goods. The paper follows an approach to preference aggregation which relies only on interpersonally...

We study the possibility of making social evaluations independently of individual preferences over non-consumed commodities. This is related to the well-known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We prove...

When evaluating long-term policies, economists usually suggest to maximize the sum of discounted utilities. On the one hand, discounted utilitarianism was given a solid axiomatic foundation by Koopmans (Econometrica 1960). On the other hand, this criterion has questionable implications when...

We consider the sharing of the cost of producing a homogeneous good when the technology has variable returns and individuals have arbitrary demands. We give a full analytical description of the family of costsharing methods that allocate costs in propor tion to demands when returns are constant,...

Assuming an odd number of voters, E. S. Maskin recently provided a characterization of majority rule based on full transitivity. This paper characterizes majority rule with a set of axioms that includes two of Maskin's, dispenses with another, and contains weak versions of his other two axioms....

We consider the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among a group of agents with single-peaked preferences. Thomson (1994a), Sönmez (1994), and Moulin (1999) introduce three different resource-monotonicity conditions. In each characterization they derive, the axioms are...