Welfarism and information invariance

Abstract.

This paper examines the consequences of imposing general information-invariance conditions in the context of welfarist social-welfare functionals. Dual relationships between invariance axioms for social-welfare functionals and the corresponding properties of the associated social-welfare orderings are established. Unlike most of the literature on information assumptions in social-choice theory, the paper does not restrict attention to invariance conditions that can be defined in terms of admissible utility transformations and, instead, employs a more general approach.