Generating a Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Ordering from Partial Welfare Judgements
at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies

Generating a Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare Ordering from Partial Welfare Judgements (pdf)

by Yongsheng Xu (with Kotaro Suzumura)
March 2003

Keywords: Bergson-Samuelson social welfare ordering, New welfare economics, Pareto-compatible partial welfare judgements

This paper is a logical complement to Suzumura's paper in Economic Journal, Vol. 109, 1999 and explores an alternative logical connection between the two schools of the "new" welfare economics, one based on the hypothetical compensation principles and another based on the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare ordering. Suzumura (1999) takes a social welfare ordering as a primitive, and asks the conditions under which we can recover the choice in accordance with this ordering from the choices in accordance with the Pareto-compatible partial welfare judgements, whereas this paper starts from the Pareto-compatible partial welfare judgements and asks the conditions under which we can generate a Bergson-Samuelson social welfare ordering.

Comments and questions regarding this paper may be directed to Yongsheng Xu at yxu3@gsu.edu.