Rational Choice and Social Welfare

The papers in this volume explore various issues relating to theories of rational choice and social welfare and their applications. The topics include resource allocation problems, population ethics, rationalizability of choice functions and demand functions for money, game theory, individual rights, and measurements of vulnerability, diversity, and changes in individual welfare. Researchers and advanced graduate students who want to learn more about such topics will find the book very useful.

Résumé
This volume brings together papers, which were ?rst presented at the International Conference on Rational Choice, Individual Rights and Non-Welfaristic Normative Economics, held in honour of Kotaro Suzumura at Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, on 1113 March 2006, and which have subsequently gone through the usual process of review by referees. We have been helped by many individuals and institutions in organizing the conference and putting this volume together. We are grateful to the authors of this volume for contributing their papers and to the referees who reviewed the papers. We gratefully acknowledge the very generous fundings by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, through the grant for the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems, and by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, through the grant for International Scienti?c Meetings in Japan, and the unstinted effort of the staff of the COE Program at Hitotsubashi University, without which the conference in 2006 would not have been possible. We thank Dr. Martina Bihn, the Editorial Director of Springer-Verlag for economics and business, for her advice and help. Finally, we would like to mention that it has been a great pleasure and privilege for us to edit this volume, which is intended to be a tribute to Kotaro Suzumura's - mense intellectual contributions, especially in the theory of rational choice, welfare economics, and the theory of social choice. Riverside Prasanta K.

Contenu
Arrovian Social Choice Theory and its Developments.- Limited Rights as Partial Veto and Sen's Impossibility Theorem.- Harmless Homotopic Dictators.- Remarks on Population Ethics.- On Non-Welfarist Social Ordering Functions.- Social Choice and Fair Allocations.- Monotonicity and Solidarity Axioms in Economics and Game Theory.- To Envy or To Be Envied? Refinements of the Envy Test for the Compensation Problem.- Choice-Consistent Resolutions of the Efficiency-Equity Trade-Off.- Characterization of the Maximin Choice Function in a Simple Dynamic Economy.- Rational Choice, Individual Welfare, and Games.- Suzumura Consistency.- On the Microtheoretic Foundations of Cagan's Demand for Money Function.- Hicksian Surplus Measures of Individual Welfare Change When There is Price and Income Uncertainty.- Beyond Normal Form Invariance: First Mover Advantage in Two-Stage Games with or without Predictable Cheap Talk.- Social Welfare and the Measurement of Unemployment and Diversity.- Unemployment and Vulnerability: A Class of Distribution Sensitive Measures, its Axiomatic Properties, and Applications.- Ordinal Distance, Dominance, and the Measurement of Diversity.- Erratum.