Value Superiority

Value Superiority, 2015

Let's say that A and B are two types of goods such that more of A or B is better than less. A is strongly superior to B if and only if any amount of A is better than any amount of B. It is weakly superior to B if and only if some amount of A is better than any amount of B. We shall first discuss some different ways in which these relations of superiority can be relevant to the aggregation of welfare. We shall then give a precise and generalised statement of Strong and Weak Superiority. Lastly, we shall prove a number of general results concerning these two relations, one of which can be used as an argument against the existence of value superiority or, alternatively, as an argument against superiority being a radical difference in value. The result in 1 This paper draws on Arrhenius (2005) and Arrhenius & Rabinowicz (2005). We would like to Olson for helpful comments. Thanks also to the Collège d'études mondiales for being such a generous host during some of the time when this paper was written. Financial support from the Swedish Research Council as well as from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme through the Franco-Swedish Program in Economics and Philosophy is gratefully acknowledged. 2 question is, roughly, that if one holds that some type of good A is strongly or weakly superior to another type of good B and that type B can be reached from type A by a long enough sequence of slight worsenings, then one is committed to holding that there are two types of goods C and D in this sequence such that C is weakly superior to D although goods of type C are only marginally better than goods of type D.

Multiple Criteria Decision Making, 2018

We are concerned with welfare orderings on the set of evaluation vectors. In our framework the number of agents, criteria or states of nature is fixed and an evaluation vector assigns a real valued evaluation to each criteria, agent or state of nature. Hence the space of evaluation vectors is a finite dimensional Euclidean space. In such a context we provide axiomatic characterizations of the utilitarian, maximin and leximin welfare orderings. The axiomatic characterization of the utilitarian welfare ordering is based on a quasi-linearity property. The axiomatic characterizations of the maximin and leximin welfare orderings are obtained by suitably modifying the axioms used by .

Journal of Economic Theory, 1987

Economics Letters, 1994

Journal of Economic Theory, 2003

The paper considers the problem of comparing income distributions for heterogeneous populations. The first contribution of this paper is a precise dominance criterion combined with a simple algorithm for implementing the criterion. This criterion is shown to be equivalent to unanimity among utilitarian social planners whose objectives are compatible with given intervals of equivalence scales. The second contribution of the paper is to show that this criterion is equivalent to dominance for two different families of social welfare functions, one inspired by Atkinson and Bourguignon (in: G.R. Feiwel (Ed.), Arrow and Foundation of the Theory of Economic Policy, Macmillan, London, 1987), in which household utility is a general function of income and needs, and a second family inspired by Ebert (Soc. Choice Welfare 16 (1999) 233), in which household utility is a function of equivalent incomes. Finally, we extend our results to the case where the distributions of needs differ between the two populations being compared. r

2016

Some good things are good for the individual who has them wholly in virtue of his relative standing compared to others. Think, for example, about votes for presidential candidates. What matters, in terms of winning the election, is the relative position of the different candidates. A candidate may have a large (absolute) amount of votes, but if someone else has more than she does, she loses. Think, also, of the educational credentials of candidates competing for a job. A local college graduate is far more likely to get the job when the other candidates didn’t attend college at all, than when his opponent has an Ivy League college on his CV. We call these positional goods. The developing literature regarding the philosophical dimensions of positional goods, offers, roughly speaking, two approaches to contend with this unique trait of positional goods. According to the first approach, positional goods’ relative nature entails

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2003

This paper extends the previous literature on the ethical links between the measurement of poverty, social welfare and inequality. We show inter alia, how, when the range of possible poverty lines is unbounded above, a robust ranking of absolute poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of social welfare, and a robust ranking of relative poverty may be interpreted as a robust ranking of inequality, and this, for any order of stochastic dominance.

Theory and Decision, 1979

2009