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‘Social choice and welfare’ at 30: its role in the development of social choice theory and welfare economics

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Abstract

The number of papers published in Social Choice and Welfare has tremendously increased over the years. This paper is a subjective overview of the parallel development of the journal and the subjects it covers.

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Notes

  1. This view seems to be shared by Wulf Gaertner since he writes in Gaertner (2009): ‘Bar-Hillel and Yaari were probably the first to study the concept of justice or just distribution via “judgments of justice”, elicited from hypothetical questions’.

  2. A fact which should lead to reconsider the excessive reference to impact factors.

  3. I am grateful to John Roemer for calling my attention to this major aspect of Yaari and Bar-Hillel’s paper in a private communication. John Roemer himself did consider and remarkably formalize this point in his 1996 book (see p. 115–125).

  4. The fact that it is a rather new domain is exemplified by its absence in the authoritative Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare (2002, 2011).

  5. See Eckman (1954); Eckman (2004); Eckman (2006) and Horvath (2001).

  6. Vagueness and ambiguity of preferences are often treated by incompleteness considerations like in Sen (2009). However, in philosophy, vagueness is the subject of supervaluation theory (see Piggins and Salles 2007) while ambiguity as studied in decision theory refers to ‘differences between behavior under unknown probabilities and behavior under known probabilities (risk)’ (see Wakker 2010, p. 278).

  7. Quote from Arrow (1963), p. 7: ‘[O]nce a machinery for making social choices from individual tastes is established, individuals will find it profitable, from a rational point of view, to misrepresent their tastes by their actions\(\ldots \) Thus, in an electoral system based on plurality voting, it is notorious that an individual who really favors a minor party candidate will frequently vote for the less undesirable of the major party candidates rather than “throw away his vote”’.

  8. Notable among these references, one can find a previous (and shorter) survey by Barberà published in Social Choice and Welfare in 2001.

  9. I am very grateful to John Weymark for drawing my attention to this seminal paper and reminding me that it could have a quasi-pioneering status.

  10. The Review of Economic Design was founded by Murat Sertel specifically to cover this subject.

  11. Other excellent surveys are by Maskin and Sjöström (2001), Palfrey (2002) and Serrano (2004).

  12. Among others, see Ricardo (1821), Mill (1871) or Sidgwick (1887). However, Marshall (1920) used ‘economics’, even though in the first sentence of the book he wrote ‘POLITICAL ECONOMY OR ECONOMICS is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing’. I could not refrain from quoting the full sentence since wellbeing is so highly emphasized!

  13. The Banks set originated in Banks (1985).

  14. Roemer (2001) gives an original treatment which is highly recommended.

  15. Guilbaud in particular gives in a footnote a limit for the occurrence of the Condorcet paradox when the number of voters increases, given that each voter has an equiprobability to have any preference–a linear order—over three candidates, as \(1 -\frac{3}{\pi } Arc \, cos \frac{1}{\sqrt{3}}=0.08774\ldots \) which has been considered rather enigmatic at the time. The only explanation he gave was ‘Pour un nombre très grand, on calcule, aux moyens des procédés habituels, une valeur limite un peu inférieure à 9 %’—‘For a very large number, one computes, with usual means, a limit value slightly less than 9 %’.

  16. Wilson and Pritchard (2007) have independently used Ehrhart polynomials.

  17. I am particularly proud of the University of Caen school on these probability calculations which has developed under Dominique Lepelley’s impetus. Boniface Mbih and Dominique Lepelley were my first graduate students.

  18. See also Peleg and Peters (2010).

  19. An essential feature of the single-profile version of Arrow’s theorem is that a neutrality assumption is made, and, as I previously mentioned, this neutrality assumption is, in an appropriate setting, a consequence of welfarism.

  20. In the special issue of the Journal of Economic Theory on inequality and risk edited by Gajdos and Weymark (2012) 12 papers on a total of 16 have one reference or more to a paper published in Social Choice and Welfare.

  21. Bartholdi et al. (1989) has rank 2.

  22. I am very grateful to John Weymark who suggested in Delhi that I added this research area, even if the special issue of Social Choice and Welfare was published after I stepped down as Coordinating Editor and so after the date indicated in the title of Sect. 2.

  23. ’Translation by G. B. Halsted in ‘The Foundations of Science’ a volume which includes translations of ‘La science et l’hypothèse’, ‘La valeur de la science’ et ‘Science et méthode’‘: ‘Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geologic excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’ sake, I verified the result at my leisure’.

  24. W. Gaertner, J. S. Kelly, P. K. Pattanaik, M. Salles.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CREM, UMR-CNRS 6211, Institute for SCW, University of Caen, 14032 , Caen cedex, France

    Maurice Salles

  2. CPNSS, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AB, UK

    Maurice Salles

  3. Murat Sertel Center for Advanced Economic Studies, Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Maurice Salles

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Correspondence to Maurice Salles.

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Presidential Address of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare given in New Delhi on 17 August 2012. I am very grateful to Marc Fleurbaey, Wulf Gaertner, Muriel Gilardone, John Roemer and John Weymark for their comments, remarks and suggestions. I tried to take all of them into consideration.

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Salles, M. ‘Social choice and welfare’ at 30: its role in the development of social choice theory and welfare economics. Soc Choice Welf 42, 1–16 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-013-0776-5

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