IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hit/hituec/a295.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Interpersonal Comparisons of the Extended Sympathy Type and the Possibility of Social Choice

Author

Listed:
  • Kotaro Suzumura

Abstract

As is well-known, Arrow’s celebrated general possibility theorem is based on the view that ‘interpersonal comparison of utilities has no meaning and, in fact, that there is no meaning relevant to welfare comparisons in the measurability of individual utility’ (Arrow, 1963, p. 9). It deserves emphasis that the reason underlying his insistence on ordinal as well as interpersonally non-comparable utilities is ‘the application of Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles’, according to which ‘only observed difference can be used as a basis for explanation’ (Arrow, 1963, p. 109). It was precisely because interpersonal comparison of utilities was considered not to be based on any observable choice behaviour that the Arrow social welfare function was to depend only on interpersonally non-comparable individual preference orderings over the set of alternative social states.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Kotaro Suzumura, 1994. "Interpersonal Comparisons of the Extended Sympathy Type and the Possibility of Social Choice," Discussion Paper Series a295, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    • Handle: RePEc:hit:hituec:a295
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tadenuma, Koichi, 2002. "Efficiency First or Equity First? Two Principles and Rationality of Social Choice," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 104(2), pages 462-472, June.
    2. Samuel Mann & Nigel O’Leary & David Blackaby, 2022. "Sexual orientation, political trust, and same-sex relationship recognition policies: evidence from Europe," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 192(3), pages 331-355, September.
    3. Tadenuma, Koichi & 蓼沼, 宏一, 2007. "Choice-Consistent Resolutions of the Efficiency-Equity Trade-Off," Discussion Papers 2007-09, Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hit:hituec:a295. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hiromichi Miyake (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iehitjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.