Since World War II the subject of social choice has grown in many and surprising ways. The impossibility theorems have suggested many directions: mathematical characterisations of voting structures satisfying various sets of conditions, the consequences of restricting choice to certain domaines, the relation to competitive equilibrium and the core, and trade-offs among the partial satisfactions of some conditions. The links with classical and modern theories of justice and, in particular, the competing ideas of rights and utilitarianism have shown the power of formal social choice analysis in illuminating the most basic philosophical arguments about the good social life. Finally, the ideals of the just society meet with the play of self interest; social choice mechanisms can lend themselves to manipulation, and the analysis of conditions under which given ideals can be realised under self interest is a political parallel to the welfare economics of the market. The contributors to these volumes focus on these issues at the forefront of current research.

Since World War II the subject of social choice has grown in many and surprising ways. The impossibility theorems have suggested many directions: mathematical characterisations of voting structures satisfying various sets of conditions, the consequences of restricting choice to certain domaines, the relation to competitive equilibrium and the core, and trade-offs among the partial satisfactions of some conditions. The links with classical and modern theories of justice and, in particular, the competing ideas of rights and utilitarianism have shown the power of formal social choice analysis in illuminating the most basic philosophical arguments about the good social life. Finally, the ideals of the just society meet with the play of self interest; social choice mechanisms can lend themselves to manipulation, and the analysis of conditions under which given ideals can be realised under self interest is a political parallel to the welfare economics of the market. The contributors to these volumes focus on these issues at the forefront of current research.

This edited book presents recent developments and state-of-the-art review in various areas of mathematical programming and game theory. It is a peer-reviewed research monograph under the ISI Platinum Jubilee Series on Statistical Science and Interdisciplinary Research. This volume provides a panoramic view of theory and the applications of the methods of mathematical programming to problems in statistics, finance, games and electrical networks. It also provides an important as well as timely overview of research trends and focuses on the exciting areas like support vector machines, bilevel programming, interior point method for convex quadratic programming, cooperative games, non-cooperative games and stochastic games. Researchers, professionals and advanced graduates will find the book an essential resource for current work in mathematical programming, game theory and their applications.

Using the economic approach of social choice theory, this unique book examines difficulties found in democratic processes involved in the creation and implementation of planning policies. Social choice theory focuses on the hard trade-offs to be made between rationality in decision-making on the one hand, and political values such as democracy, liberalism and freedom from manipulation on the other. As an institution can be seen as a set of rules, the focus on rules and procedures of collective choice makes social choice theory well suited for analysing important political aspects of planning institutions. Special attention is given to communicative planning and the logical reasons why all the desirable properties of dialogue cannot be simultaneously attained. The analysis provides original and significant new insights into the process and the institutions involved. It highlights weak spots of present planning techniques and procedures and suggests further steps towards institutionally enriched planning theory.

This second part of a two-volume set continues to describe economists' efforts to quantify the social decisions people necessarily make and the philosophies that those choices define. Contributors draw on lessons from philosophy, history, and other disciplines, but they ultimately use editor Kenneth Arrow's seminal work on social choice as a jumping-off point for discussing ways to incentivize, punish, and distribute goods. - Develops many subjects from Volume 1 (2002) while introducing new themes in welfare economics and social choice theory - Features four sections: Foundations, Developments of the Basic Arrovian Schemes, Fairness and Rights, and Voting and Manipulation - Appeals to readers who seek introductions to writings on human well-being and collective decision-making - Presents a spectrum of material, from initial insights and basic functions to important variations on basic schemes

Wulf Gaertner provides a comprehensive account of an important and complex issue within social choice theory: how to establish a social welfare function while restricting the spectrum of individual preferences in a sensible way. Gaertner's starting point is K. J. Arrow's famous 'Impossibility Theorem', which showed that no welfare function could exist if an unrestricted domain of preferences is to be satisfied together with some other appealing conditions. A number of leading economists have tried to provide avenues out of this 'impossibility' by restricting the variety of preferences: here, Gaertner provides a clear and detailed account, using standardized mathematical notation, of well over forty theorems associated with domain conditions. Domain Conditions in Social Choice Theory will be an essential addition to the library of social choice theory for scholars and their advanced graduate students.

This book presents a range of papers by philosophers and economists who consider the definition and value of liberty; freedom in rights and equality of opportunity. Until recently freedom has played no explicit role in the conceptual framework of economists, however freedom seems to be at the heart of economics. The book provides a substantial contribution to the fruitful dialogue between the philosophy and economics in this area. Each chapter is integrated being followed by comments which explore the underlying debates. Contributors are French economists, philosophers and political scientists, as well as authors from Belgium and the Netherlands.

This volume brings together papers, which were ?rst presented at the International Conference on Rational Choice, Individual Rights and Non-Welfaristic Normative Economics, held in honour of Kotaro Suzumura at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, on 11–13 March 2006, and which have subsequently gone through the usual process of review by referees. We have been helped by many individuals and institutions in organizing the conference and putting this volume together. We are grateful to the authors of this volume for contributing their papers and to the referees who reviewed the papers. We gratefully acknowledge the very generous fundings by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, through the grant for the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems, and by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, through the grant for International Scienti?c Meetings in Japan, and the unstinted effort of the staff of the COE Program at Hitotsubashi University, without which the conference in 2006 would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Martina Bihn, the Editorial Director of Springer-Verlag for economics and business, for her advice and help. Finally, we would like to mention that it has been a great pleasure and privilege for us to edit this volume, which is intended to be a tribute to Kotaro Suzumura’s - mense intellectual contributions, especially in the theory of rational choice, welfare economics, and the theory of social choice. Riverside Prasanta K.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the social choice literature and shows, by applying fuzzy sets, how the use of fuzzy preferences, rather than that of strict ones, may affect the social choice theorems. To do this, the book explores the presupposition of rationality within the fuzzy framework and shows that the two conditions for rationality, completeness and transitivity, do exist with fuzzy preferences. Specifically, this book examines: the conditions under which a maximal set exists; the Arrow’s theorem; the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem and the median voter theorem. After showing that a non-empty maximal set does exists for fuzzy preference relations, this book goes on to demonstrating the existence of a fuzzy aggregation rule satisfying all five Arrowian conditions, including non-dictatorship. While the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem only considers individual fuzzy preferences, this work shows that both individuals and groups can choose alternatives to various degrees, resulting in a social choice that can be both strategy-proof and non-dictatorial. Moreover, the median voter theorem is shown to hold under strict fuzzy preferences but not under weak fuzzy preferences. By providing a standard model of fuzzy social choice and by drawing the necessary connections between the major theorems, this book fills an important gap in the current literature and encourages future empirical research in the field.

This book explores how different ideas of the common good may be compared, contrasted and ranked.