Social choice in economic environments (Q1115325)

The authors investigate the robustness of Arrow's negative result about social welfare functions when individual preferences and feasible sets satisfy restrictions usually associated with economic environments. The feasible set consists of all compact, comprehensive (i.e., satisfying the free disposal assumption) subsets of the positive orthant of a multidimensional Euclidean space which satisfy a nondegeneracy condition and the preferences are required to be continuous. Possibility and impossibility results are obtained depending on variations about the independence condition and the economic environments.