Parts three and four are devoted to algebraic and combinatorial aspects of social choice theory, including analyses of Arrow's Theorem, consensus functions, and the role of geometry. Part five deals with the application of cooperative game theory to social choice.

This book explores how different ideas of the common good may be compared, contrasted and ranked.

Originally published in 1970, this classic study has been recognized for its groundbreaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice, including aggregative assessment. It has also had a large influence on international organizations, including the United Nations, notably in its work on human development. The book showed that the "impossibility theorems" in social choice theory--led by the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow--do not negate the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice. Sen's ideas about social choice, welfare economics, inequality, poverty, and human rights have continued to evolve since the book's first appearance. This expanded edition preserves the text of the original while presenting eleven new chapters of fresh arguments and results. "Expanding on the early work of Condorcet, Pareto, Arrow, and others, Sen provides rigorous mathematical argumentation on the merits of voting mechanisms...For those with graduate training, it will serve as a frequently consulted reference and a necessity on one's book shelf." --J. F. O'Connell, Choice

This volume comprises papers presented at the Symposium on Collective Choice, by leading experts in this field. It presents recent advances in Social Choice Theory and Welfare Economics. The papers are classified in two broad groups: (1) those dealing with the ethical aspects of the theory of social choice and (2) those concerned with the positive aspects. The papers in the first part are concerned with the Arrow-type aggregation problem or aspects of it and with more specific questions relating to optimality, justice and welfare. In part II several papers discuss the problem of strategic misrevelation of preferences by individuals, others discuss simple voting games, social choice-correspondences and electoral competition. The main features are: - Recent advances in social choice theory and welfare economics - New mathematical approaches to social choice theory (differential and algebraic topology) -New aspects of the concepts of justice and optimality in welfare economics and social choice.

This book covers the main topics of welfare economics — general equilibrium models of exchange and production, Pareto optimality, un certainty, externalities and public goods — and some of the major topics of social choice theory — compensation criteria, fairness, voting. Arrow's Theorem, and the theory of implementation. The underlying question is this: "Is a particular economic or voting mechanism good or bad for society?" Welfare economics is mainly about whether the market mechanism is good or bad; social choice is largely about whether voting mechanisms, or other more abstract mechanisms, can improve upon the results of the market. This second edition updates the material of the first, written by Allan Feldman. It incorporates new sections to existing first-edition chapters, and it includes several new ones. Chapters 4, 6, 11, 15 and 16 are new, added in this edition. The first edition of the book grew out of an undergraduate welfare economics course at Brown University. The book is intended for the undergraduate student who has some prior familiarity with microeconomics. However, the book is also useful for graduate students and professionals, economists and non-economists, who want an overview of welfare and social choice results unburdened by detail and mathematical complexity. Welfare economics and social choice both probably suffer from ex cessively technical treatments in professional journals and monographs.

This volume presents interviews that have been conducted from the 1980s to the present with important scholars of social choice and welfare theory. Starting with a brief history of social choice and welfare theory written by the book editors, it features 15 conversations with four Nobel Laureates and other key scholars in the discipline. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part presents four conversations with the founding fathers of modern social choice and welfare theory: Kenneth Arrow, John Harsanyi, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen. The second part includes conversations with scholars who made important contributions to the discipline from the early 1970s onwards. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of economics, and the history of social choice and welfare theory in particular.

Outcomes–based, procedurally –detached social welfare theory is found to be indeterminate, irreconcilable with the moral force of rights, and non–accommodative of alternative understandings of justice. The author argues, therefore, for an explicitly normative, contractarian approach to economic theory and institutional appraisal.