A DIFFICULTY IN THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL WELFARE
A DIFFICULTY IN THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL WELFARE
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DOI：
10.1086/256963
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发表时间：
1950-08-01
影响因子：
8.2
通讯作者：
Arrow, Kenneth J.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Arrow, Kenneth J.
IN A capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make" political" decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make" economic" decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems, Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the so-'This paper is based on research carried on at the RAND Corporation, a project of the United States Air Force, and at the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics and is part of a longer study," Social Choice and Individual Values," to be published by John Wiley & Sons as a Cowles Commission monograph. A version was read at the December, 1948, meeting of the Econometric Society. I am indebted to A. Kaplan, University of California at Los Angeles, and JWT Youngs, University of Indiana, for guidance in formulating the problem, and to A. Bergson and AG Hart, Columbia University, and TC Koopmans, Cowles Commission and the University of Chicago, who have read the manuscript and made valuable comments on both the presentation and the meaning. Needless to say, any error or opacity remaining is the responsibility of the author.
