"Two Criteria for Social Decisions"  
		
Marc Fleurbaey
Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract:	
This paper studies the ethical underpinnings of two social 
criteria which are prominent in the literature dealing with the problem of 
evaluating allocations of several consumption goods in a population with 
heteregenous preferences. The Pazner-Schmeidler criterion 
(Pazner-Schmeidler 1978) and the Walrasian criterion (Fleurbaey and 
Maniquet 1996) are prima facie quite different. But it is shown here that 
these criteria are related to close variants of the fairness condition that 
an allocation is better when every individual bundle in it dominates the 
average consumption in another allocation. In addition, the results suggest 
that the Pazner-Schmeidler criterion can be viewed as the best extension of 
the Walrasian criterion to non-convex economies.

JEL Classification: D63, D71
Keywords: social welfare, social choice, fairness