A Foundation for Pareto Aggregation

Abstract

A social welfare function ƒ maps the family of profiles of economic preferences into the set of continuous and quasitransitive relations on the space of allocations of public and/or private goods. If ƒ satisfies Arrow′s independence axiom and an extremely mild responsiveness condition, then ƒ must be oligarchical. However, Pareto aggregation is the only oligarchical rule that does not completely exclude someone from consideration or invert someone′s preference ordering before incorporating it into the group preference. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D60, D63, D71.