A Proposal for an Excessivist Social Welfare Ordering

Details

Supervisors

Maniquet, François

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a sub-class of rank-weighted social welfare orderings that we call ”Excessivist”. The Excessivist Social Welfare Ordering (eSWO) judges incomes above a fixed threshold as detrimental for the society. To accomplish this, the identification of a richness or affluence line is necessary; we employ a fixed, exogenous line of excess. We define an eSWO in form of a weighted sum of individual’s incomes. This requires to introduces n+1 vectors of weights, one for all possible number of individuals below the threshold. To do this, the paper introduces some modifications of the class of rank-weighted social welfare orderings. Indeed, in our proposal, we allow the weights to be both positive (for individuals below the line) and negative (for individuals above); moreover, they assure that the higher the number of excessively rich individuals, the greater the negative impact the society has and vice versa. Then we introduce ethical concerns through an axiomatic approach. We proved that the proposed ordering satisfies the following axioms: absolute Aversion to Excessive Richness (AER), Pigou Dalton positive weights preserving Transfer (PDwpT), sign weight preserving Ratio Scale Comparability (swpRSC) and Strong Pareto below the threshold (SPb).