ORDERING INFINITE UTILITY STREAMS : COMPLETENESS AT THE COST OF A NON-RAMSEY SET
Session Social Choice
Event/Category ESEM: Theoretical and Applied Economics
Session ChairSalvador Barbera, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

Presenter(s) Luc Lauwers, KULeuven Belgium
Co-Author(s) None
Fields Collective Decision Making, Cooperative Games and Preferences and Decision Making
Keywords anonymity, axiom of choice, completeness, equity, Pareto and social welfare orderings
JEL Codes D63, D71

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The existence of a complete, Paretian, and finite anonymous ordering in the set of infinite utility streams implies the existence of a non-Ramsey set (a nonconstructive object the existence of which needs the axiom of choice). Therefore, each Paretian and finite anonymous social welfare relation either is incomplete or does not have an explicit description. Furthermore, the strongest anonymity condition that is compatible with Pareto involves a free ultrafilter on the lattice of partitions of positive integers. These results confirm a conjecture of Fleurbaey and Michel (2003) and further disentangle the theorems of Diamond (1965), Basu and Mitra (2003), and Svensson (1980).

 
When & Where
Thu 30 Aug 2007
11:30 - 13:30
Room B-9
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    Paper Reference: 1956.