Social Choice and Welfare 

About: Social Choice and Welfare is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Social choice theory & Voting. It has an ISSN identifier of 0176-1714. Over the lifetime, 2077 publications have been published receiving 46688 citations. The journal is also known as: Social choice and welfare (Print).

The computational difficulty of manipulating an election

Abstract: We show how computational complexity might protect the integrity of social choice. We exhibit a voting rule that efficiently computes winners but is computationally resistant to strategic manipulation. It is NP-complete for a manipulative voter to determine how to exploit knowledge of the preferences of others. In contrast, many standard voting schemes can be manipulated with only polynomial computational effort.

Voting schemes for which it can be difficult to tell who won the election

Abstract: We show that a voting scheme suggested by Lewis Carroll can be impractical in that it can be computationally prohibitive (specifically, NP-hard) to determine whether any particular candidate has won an election. We also suggest a class of “impracticality theorems” which say that any fair voting scheme must, in the worst-case, require excessive computation to determine a winner.

Multidimensional poverty indices

Abstract: This paper explores the axiomatic foundation of multidimensional poverty indices. Departing from the income approach which measures poverty by aggregating shortfalls of incomes from a pre-determined poverty-line income, a multidimensional index is a numerical representation of shortfalls of basic needs from some pre-specified minimum levels. The class of subgroup consistent poverty indices introduced by Foster and Shorrocks (1991) is generalized to the multidimensional context. New concepts necessary for the design of distribution-sensitive multidimensional poverty measures are introduced. Specific classes of subgroup consistent multidimensional poverty measures are derived based on sets of reasonable axioms. This paper also highlights the fact that domain restrictions may have a critical role in the design of multidimensional indices.

Core in a Simple Coalition Formation Game

Abstract: We analyze the core of a class of coalition formation game in which every player's payoff depends only on the members of her coalition. We first consider anonymous games and additively separable games. Neither of these strong properties guarantee the existence of a core allocation, even if additional strong properties are imposed. We then introduce two top-coalition properties each of which guarantee the existence. We show that these properties are independent of the Scarf-balancedness condition. Finally we give several economic applications.

An axiomatic approach to sustainable development

Abstract: The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these axioms. They exhibit sensitivity to the present and to the long-run future, and specify trade-offs between them. It examines other welfare criteria which are generally utilized: discounted utility, lim inf. long run averages, overtaking and catching-up criteria, Ramsey's criterion, Rawlsian rules, and the criterion of satisfaction of basic needs, and finds that none satisfies the axioms for sustainability. Theorem 2 gives a characterization of all continuous independent sustainable preferences. Theorem 3 shows that in general sustainable growth paths cannot be approximated by paths which approximate discounted optima. Proposition 1 shows that paths which maximize the present value under a standard price system may fail to reach optimal sustainable welfare levels, and Example 4 that the two criteria can give rise to different value systems.