Abstract.
This paper examines how freedom of choice as reflected in an agent’s opportunity sets can be measured in economic environments where opportunity sets are linear budget sets in the non-negative orthant of the n-dimensional real space. Three axioms, Symmetry, Monotonicity and Invariance of Scaling Effects, are proposed for this purpose and the measure based on volumes of budget sets is characterized.
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I am grateful to Prasanta K. Pattanaik for his encouragement and fruitful discussions over many years on this and related subjects. The first draft of this paper was written while I was visiting the Institute of Economic Research at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. I would like to thank its hospitality. Helpful comments of a referee are gratefully acknowledged.
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Xu, Y. On ranking linear budget sets in terms of freedom of choice. Soc Choice Welfare 22, 281–289 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-003-0287-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-003-0287-x