Social welfare functions and social prefernce ordering functions

8 important questions on Social welfare functions and social prefernce ordering functions

The multiplicative Social Welfare Function

“In a bargaining situation, when utility increase of the bargaining parties is measured relative to the status quo, and when the status quo is assumed to be fair, then maximisation of the multiplicative SWF gives the fair outcome.”

Nash’s principle for selecting the fairest point on a contract curve

•Nash claimed that the fairest point on the contract curve in a bargaining situation is the point for which the multiplicative SWF is maximal, i.e. for which the product of the individual utility gains is maximal.
Application of Nash’s principle requires that negotiators are totally open and honest towards an adjudicator regarding their utility functions.

The additive Social Welfare Function

In many cases other than bargaining situations, including Social Cost-Benefit Analysis, an additive SWF is the more natural form.
•Adding up amounts of money, goods, land, etc. usually makes more sense than multiplying them.
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Can individual utilities be interpersonally compared?

In order to use SWF’s for selecting good or optimal states of the world (and for taking collective decisions to realise those states), the individual utility values should be interpersonally comparable.
It is often assumed that individual utilities are not interpersonally comparable

Social preference ordering function

A social preference ordering function is a function that assigns to all possible combinations of individual preference orderings

>1, …, >i, …, >n

one and exactly one ordering, which is the “social preference ordering” >SP

Relaxing the requirements of Arrow's theorim

It appears that unrestricted domain is not really necessary or desirable. For there apparently may exist individual preferences that should not be respected in a social choice procedure


Independence of irrelevant alternatives
This restriction is equivalent to forbidding quantitative preference information (and therewith forbidding the Borda count. One reason for wanting to exclude such quantitative preference information is that systems working with such quantitative information are (more) prone to strategic behaviour.

Implication of Arrow: the need for constitutional safeguards.

Constitutional safeguards should be added to any procedure for collective choice in order that the procedures do not lead to violation of individual rights. These safeguards identify “inviolable individual preferences” of voters that cannot be overruled by other voters.

What is the “distributional issue”, according to Mueller?

The need to deal with unjust starting situations



It remains that the situation from which the decision process starts may be considered unjust, e.g. because of previous violations of “constitutional safeguards”.

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