RUI:Equity-Efficiency Trade-Offs

社会福利函数是一个公式，它将相互冲突的个人偏好聚合成一个社会偏好方案，用于集体决策。该公式应满足基本的人口价值或公理。阿罗获得诺贝尔奖的部分原因是他证明了“不可能定理”，即不可能构建一个符合公平和经济学基本假设的社会福利函数。不可能定理经受住了许多通过削弱这些公理来恢复一致性的尝试。不像其他不可能定理的处理，只是寻求扩展福利经济学中的标准定理，研究者开发了利用标准分配模型的代数和拓扑结构的方法，以获得对公共选择的非常普遍的见解。例如，研究者最近证明，社会福利函数要么对个人偏好完全没有反应，要么在经济的每一个环节都有一些个人被剥夺了分享私人物品的权利。该项目继续调查在较弱的传递性假设下的经济环境中的社会选择，在公共和私人物品模型中，在要求较低和更现实的偏好揭示下。在代际社会选择模型中。这个项目的贡献来自于开发了一种新的方式来看待为公共决策提供公理基础的问题。在现实世界的公共政策问题中，研究者已经成功地证明了在各种经济环境中公平与效率之间权衡的新定理。进一步发展这种有前途的方法是必要的，因为新方法将为分析集体选择提供有用的工具，并为许多经济问题提供实质性的新见解。

A social welfare function is a formula for aggregating conflicting individual preferences into a social preference scheme to be used for collective decision making. The formula should satisfy basic demographic values or axioms. K.J.Arrow received the Noble prize in part for his proof of the Impossibility Theorem, i.e., that it is impossible to construct a social welfare function consistent with basic assumptions of equity and economics. The Impossibility Theorem has survived many attempts to restore consistency by weakening these axioms. Unlike other treatments of the Impossibility Theorem which simply seek to extend standard theorems in welfare economics, the investigator has developed methods for exploiting the algebraic and topological structure of the standard allocation models to obtain very general insights into public choice. For example, the investigator proved recently that the social welfare function is either completely unresponsive to individual preference or there is some individual who is denied any share in the economy's private goods at every turn. The project continues to investigate social choice in economic environments under weaker transitivity assumptions, in models with public and private goods, under less demanding and more realistic preference revelation desiderata, and in intergenerational social choice models. The contribution of this project comes from developing a new way of looking at the question of providing an axiomatic foundation for public decision making. The investigator has already succeeded in proving new theorems about the trade-offs between equity and efficiency in the types of economic settings found in real-world public policy problems. Further development of this promising approach is warranted because the new methods will provide useful tools for analyzing collective choice and substantial new insights into many economic problems.