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Social Choice Theory
Social choice theory is a branch of welfare economics that extends the Decision theory, theory of rational choice to collective decision-making. Social choice studies the behavior of different mathematical procedures (social welfare function, social welfare functions) used to combine individual preferences into a coherent whole.Amartya Sen (2008). "Social Choice". ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 2nd EditionAbstract & TOC./ref> It contrasts with political science in that it is a Normative economics, normative field that studies how a society can make good decisions, whereas political science is a Positive economics, descriptive field that observes how societies actually do make decisions. While social choice began as a branch of economics and decision theory, it has since received substantial contributions from mathematics, philosophy, political science, and game theory. Real-world examples of social choice rules include constitution, constitutions and Parliamentary ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Welfare Economics
Welfare economics is a field of economics that applies microeconomic techniques to evaluate the overall well-being (welfare) of a society. The principles of welfare economics are often used to inform public economics, which focuses on the ways in which government intervention can improve social welfare. Additionally, welfare economics serves as the theoretical foundation for several instruments of public economics, such as cost–benefit analysis. The intersection of welfare economics and behavioral economics has given rise to the subfield of behavioral welfare economics. Two fundamental theorems are associated with welfare economics. The first states that competitive markets, under certain assumptions, lead to Pareto efficient outcomes. This idea is sometimes referred to as Adam Smith's invisible hand. The second theorem states that with further restrictions, any Pareto efficient outcome can be achieved through a competitive market equilibrium, provided that a social ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marquis De Condorcet
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (; ; 17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French Philosophy, philosopher, Political economy, political economist, Politics, politician, and mathematician. His ideas, including support for liberal economy, free markets, Universal access to education, public education, constitutionalism, constitutional government, and Social equality, equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale – and the Jacobin faction in particular – voted to have Condorcet arrested. He died in prison after a period of hiding from the French Revolutionary authorities. Early years Condorcet was born in Ribemont (in present-day Aisne), descended ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Resource Economics
Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural resources. One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability for future generations. Resource economists study interactions between economic and natural systems, with the goal of developing a sustainable and efficient economy. Areas of discussion Natural resource economics is a transdisciplinary field of academic research within economics that aims to address the connections and interdependence between human economies and natural ecosystems. Its focus is how to operate an economy within the ecological constraints of earth's natural resources.Encyclopedia of EarthArticle Topic: ecological economics/ref> Resource economics brings together and connects different disciplines within the natural and social sciences connec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mechanism Design
Mechanism design (sometimes implementation theory or institution design) is a branch of economics and game theory. It studies how to construct rules—called Game form, mechanisms or institutions—that produce good outcomes according to Social welfare function, some predefined metric, even when the designer does not know the players' true preferences or what information they have. Mechanism design thus focuses on the study of solution concepts for a class of private-information games. Mechanism design has broad applications, including traditional domains of economics such as market design, but also political science (through voting theory). It is a foundational component in the operation of the internet, being used in networked systems (such as inter-domain routing), e-commerce, and Sponsored search auction, advertisement auctions by Facebook and Google. Because it starts with the end of the game (a particular result), then works backwards to find a game that implements it, it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strategy-proof
In mechanism design, a strategyproof (SP) mechanism is a game form in which each player has a weakly- dominant strategy, so that no player can gain by "spying" over the other players to know what they are going to play. When the players have private information (e.g. their type or their value to some item), and the strategy space of each player consists of the possible information values (e.g. possible types or values), a truthful mechanism is a game in which revealing the true information is a weakly-dominant strategy for each player. An SP mechanism is also called dominant-strategy-incentive-compatible (DSIC), to distinguish it from other kinds of incentive compatibility. A SP mechanism is immune to manipulations by individual players (but not by coalitions). In contrast, in a group strategyproof mechanism, no group of people can collude to misreport their preferences in a way that makes every member better off. In a strong group strategyproof mechanism, no group of people can c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Population Ethics
Population ethics is the philosophical study of the ethical problems arising when our actions affect ''who'' is born and ''how many'' people are born in the future. An important area within population ethics is population axiology, which is "the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, ''when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live''." Moral philosopher Derek Parfit brought population ethics to the attention of the academic community as a modern branch of moral philosophy in his seminal work '' Reasons and Persons'' in 1984. Discussions of population ethics are thus a relatively recent development in the history of philosophy. Formulating a satisfactory theory of population ethics is regarded as "notoriously difficult". While scholars have proposed and debated many different population ethical theories, no consensus in the academic community has emerged. Gustaf Arrhenius ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fair Division
Fair division is the problem in game theory of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an Entitlement (fair division), entitlement to them so that each person receives their due share. The central tenet of fair division is that such a division should be performed by the players themselves, without the need for external arbitration, as only the players themselves really know how they value the goods. There are many different kinds of fair division problems, depending on the nature of goods to divide, the criteria for fairness, the nature of the players and their preferences, and other criteria for evaluating the quality of the division. The archetypal fair division algorithm is divide and choose. The research in fair division can be seen as an extension of this procedure to various more complex settings. Description In game theory, fair division is the problem of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an Entitlement (fair division), entitlem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compensation Principle
In welfare economics, the compensation principle refers to a decision rule used to select between pairs of alternative feasible social states. One of these states is the hypothetical point of departure ("the original state"). According to the compensation principle, if the prospective gainers could compensate (any) prospective losers and leave no one worse off, the alternate state is to be selected. An example of a compensation principle is the Pareto criterion in which a change in states entails that such compensation is not merely feasible but required. Two variants are: * the Pareto principle, which requires any change such that ''all'' gain. * the (strong) Pareto criterion, which requires any change such that ''at least one'' gains and no one loses from the change. In non-hypothetical contexts such that the compensation occurs (say in the marketplace), invoking the compensation principle is unnecessary to effect the change. But its use is more controversial and complex w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Choice And Individual Values
Kenneth Arrow's monograph ''Social Choice and Individual Values'' (1951; revised in 1963 and 2012) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor. Somewhat formally, the "social choice" in the title refers to Arrow's representation of how ''social values'' from the ''set of individual orderings'' would be implemented under the ''constitution''. Less formally, each social choice corresponds to the feasible set of laws passed by a "vote" (the set of orderings) under the constitution even if not every individual voted in favor of all the laws. The work culminated in what Arrow called the "General Possibility Theorem," better known thereafter as Arrow's (impossibility) theorem. The theorem states that, absent restrictions on either individual preferences or neutrality of the constitution to feasible alternatives, there exists no social choice rule that satisfies a set of plausible requireme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Joseph Arrow (August 23, 1921 – February 21, 2017) was an American economist, mathematician and political theorist. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1957, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972, along with John Hicks. In economics, Arrow was a major figure in postwar neoclassical economic theory. Four of his students (Roger Myerson, Eric Maskin, John Harsanyi, and Michael Spence) went on to become Nobel laureates themselves. His contributions to social choice theory, notably his " impossibility theorem", and his work on general equilibrium analysis are significant. His work in many other areas of economics, including endogenous growth theory and the economics of information, was also foundational. Education and early career Arrow was born on August 23, 1921, in New York City. Arrow's mother, Lilian (Greenberg), was from Iași, Romania, and his father, Harry Arrow, was from nearby Podu Iloaiei. The family was of Romanian-Jewish desc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Late Middle Ages
The late Middle Ages or late medieval period was the Periodization, period of History of Europe, European history lasting from 1300 to 1500 AD. The late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renaissance). Around 1350, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and Plague (disease), plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it had been before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. Kingdom of France, France and Kingdom of England, England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively, those events ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull (; ; – 1316), sometimes anglicized as ''Raymond Lully'', was a philosopher, theologian, poet, missionary, Christian apologist and former knight from the Kingdom of Majorca. He invented a philosophical system known as the ''Art'', conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities. The ''Art'' consists of a set of general principles and combinatorial operations. It is illustrated with diagrams. A prolific writer, he is also known for his literary works written in Catalan, which he composed to make his ''Art'' accessible to a wider audience. In addition to Catalan and Latin, he also probably wrote in Arabic (although no texts in Arabic survive). His books were translated into Occitan, French, and Castilian during his lifetime. Although his work did not enjoy huge success during his lifetime, he has had a rich and continuing reception. In the early modern period his name became asso ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
