In the very general setting of Armstrong (1980) for Arrow's Theorem, I show two results. First, in an infinite society, Anonymity is inconsistent with Unanimity and Independence if and only if a domain for social welfare functions satisfies a modest condition of richness. While Arrow's axioms...

This chapter discusses different types of domain restrictions. We begin by analyzing various qualitative conditions on preference profiles. Value-restricted preferences (with single-peaked preferences as one of its subcases), limited agreement as well as antagonistic and dichotomous preferences...

Given a set of outcomes that affect the welfare of the members of a group, K.J. Arrow imposed the following five conditions on the ordering of the outcomes as a function of the preferences of the individual group members, and then proved that the conditions are logically inconsistent: • The...

I build a model to make a key point that social welfare functions that only rely on individual utility (or individual preference orderings) still may reflect what people typically think of as a non-welfarist approach, further suggesting that non-welfarist methods (e.g., paternalistic methods)...

We study the phenomenon of strategic polarization in group interactions. Agents with private preferences choose a public action (e.g., voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group outcome and...

We study the judgment aggregation problem from the perspective of justifying a particular collective decision by a corresponding aggregation on the criteria. In particular, we characterize the logical relations between the decision and the criteria that enable justification of a majority...

This article surveys the literature that investigates the consistency of Arrow's social choice axioms when his unrestricted domain assumptions are replaced by domain conditions that incorporate the restrictions on agendas and preferences encountered in economic environments. Both social welfare...

Social marginal welfare weights play an important role in areas of applied public policy analysis such as tax reform. These weights reflect the values of the social planner, or equivalently the underlying social welfare function. A number of recent papers have questioned the "default"...

The economics literature on mercantilism tends to emphasize gold hoarding and external barriers to trade as defining characteristics. However, medieval institutions included a host of internal barriers to trade as well as external ones. High offices were often for sale as were monopoly...