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On Ranking Opportunity Sets in Terms of Freedom of Choice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2016

Prasanta K. Pattanaik  and
Yongsheng Xu
Prasanta K. Pattanaik
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
Yongsheng Xu
Affiliation:
Tulane University, New Orleans
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Summary

The paper explores the notion of freedom of choice which is of considerable importance in welfare economics and the theory of social choice. Three plausible axioms are introduced for ranking alternative opportunity sets in terms of the degrees of freedom that they offer to the agent making choices. It is shown that, under these axioms, judgements about degrees of freedom of choice have to be based on the naive principle of simply counting the number of available options.

Résumé

Résumé

Notre article a pour objet la notion de liberté de choix. Trois axiomes plausibles sont proposés pour ranger les ensembles d’options possibles en fonction de la liberté de choix qu’ils offrent aux agents. Il est montré que, pour ces axiomes, les jugements quant à la liberté de choix doivent être fondés sur le principe élémentaire d’un comptage du nombre d’alternatives possibles.

Keywords

024025024025
Type
Research Article
Information
Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 3-4: A Special Issue in Honor of Professor A. Sen : Alternatives to Welfarism , 1990 , pp. 383 - 390
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 1990 

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Footnotes

*

For helpful comments, we are grateful to Nick Baigent, Alex Rosenberg, Henry Scott, Amartya Sen and Kunal Sengupta. We are also grateful for financial support from the Murphy Institute of Political Economy, Tulane University, which made this collaboration possible.

References

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