A never-decisive and anonymous criterion for optimal growth models (Q2447143)

The paper is devoted to the question of the existence of a social welfare function (SWF) that would be sustainable and would allow to obtain solutions to optimal growth models. In Section 2, the authors present the never-decisiveness criteria when the state space is, respectively, \(l^+_\infty\) or \([0,1]^\infty\). They show that for an optimal growth model with decreasing returns for high value of capital stock where the utilities of the streams of consumptions typically belong to \([0,1]^\infty\), there exists no SWF which is never-decisive. They then restrict the state space to the sets of utilities for which the value of the SWF is finite. In Section 3, the authors show that, actually, the Gale's overtaking criterion, restricted to the set of good programs, is anonymous and never-decisive. Section 4 shows that using the overtaking criterion, one can obtain optimal solutions to growth models.