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Social Choice Correspondences*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2016

Nick Baigent
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Extract

An Arrowian social welfare function is single-valued. That is, to any set of individual orderings a social welfare function assigns one, and only one, social ordering. While other features of the Arrowian framework have given rise to a huge volume of literature, single-valuedness does not seem to have attracted any attention at all and, on the face of it, this may seem hardly surprising. After all, given that social choice is to depend on a binary relation of social preference (or what has been called a relational procedure in Sen (1977)), single-valuedness seems natural and unobjectionable. Furthermore, it is not clear that anything can be gained by relaxing it. However, the question of single-valuedness and its implications is not quite so simple.

Type
Research Article
Information
Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 125 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 1980 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank all participants at the following seminars at which versions of this paper were given : University College, London, especially Wulf Gaetner; University of London Statistics Seminar at Imperial College of Science and Technology, especially Henry Wynn and Geof Hyman; University College Swansea; University of Wales Economics Colloquim at Gregynog; University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, especially Mike Jones-Lee; University of York. Finally, Paramesh Ray provided valuable comments. All errors and omissions are my own.

References

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