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Social Choice Rules with Responsibility for Individual Skills

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  • Kensei Nakamura

Abstract

This paper examines normatively acceptable criteria for evaluating social states when individuals are responsible for their skills or productivity and these factors should be accounted for. We consider social choice rules over sets of feasible utility vectors \`a la Nash's (1950) bargaining problem. First, we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for choice rules to be rationalized by welfare orderings or functions over ability-normalized utility vectors. These general results provide a foundation for exploring novel choice rules with the normalization and providing their axiomatic foundations. By adding natural axioms, we propose and axiomatize a new class of choice rules, which can be viewed as combinations of three key principles: distribution according to individuals' abilities, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism. Furthermore, we show that at the axiomatic level, this class of choice rules is closely related to the classical bargaining solution introduced by Kalai and Smorodinsky (1975).

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  • Kensei Nakamura, 2025. "Social Choice Rules with Responsibility for Individual Skills," Papers 2502.04989, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2025.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2502.04989
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Omer F. Baris, 2018. "Timing effect in bargaining and ex ante efficiency of the relative utilitarian solution," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 84(4), pages 547-556, June.
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    3. Walter Bossert & Kohei Kamaga, 2020. "An axiomatization of the mixed utilitarian–maximin social welfare orderings," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 69(2), pages 451-473, March.
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    5. Xu, Yongsheng & Yoshihara, Naoki, 2006. "Alternative characterizations of three bargaining solutions for nonconvex problems," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 86-92, October.
    6. Eric Maskin, 1978. "A Theorem on Utilitarianism," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 45(1), pages 93-96.
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