Equity, Efficiency and Social Choice

Professor Campbell addresses the standard social choice questions about the allocation of public and private goods within the special framework of welfare economics. He also proves some fundamental theorems on efficiency and equity in public policy analysis.;Arrow's impossibility theorem discloses some elementary conditions under which full efficiency implies that a social welfare function is insensitive to the preferences of all but a single individual. This book argues that any degree of sensitivity to individual preferences implies that the social welfare function is independent of the preferences of all but one person. In this and other ways, the absence of meaningful efficiency-equity trade-offs is demonstrated. The framework is a conventional allocation space with standard economic restrictions on the nature of individual preferences. Classical impossibility theorems, including Arrow's, are proved en route to the main results.