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International audience; Social choice functions are generalized to handle Nash's independence of irrelevant alternatives. Possibility and impossibility results are established.

This paper describes an unknown episode in the development of the theory of social choice. In the Summer 1949, while at RAND, Quine worked on Arrow’s (im)possibility theorem. This work was eventually published as a paper on (applied) set theory totally disconnected from social choice. The working paper directly linked to Arrow’s work was never published. I alluded to this (then unwritten) paper in a number of presentations I made on ‘Logic and Social Choice’ in Turku, Bucharest, Boston, Strasbourg and Munich, between October 2013 and January 2015. It was eventually first presented during a conference at Queen Mary, University of London, 19–20 June 2015, on ‘Social Welfare, Justice and Distribution: Celebrating John Roemer’s Contributions to Economics, Political Philosophy and Political Science’, organized by Roberto Veneziani and Juan Moreno-Ternero. I am grateful to the participants for interesting reactions and comments, in particular Richard Arneson, Jon Elster, Marc Fleurbaey, Klaus Nehring and Gil Skillman. Jon Elster contacted Dagfinn Føllesdal, a well-known philosopher and a pre-eminent Quine scholar, who kindly responded to some queries. A more developed version was presented in Aix-en-Provence during the International Conference on Economic Philosophy and in Lund during the meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in June 2016. Comments of participants to these two events revealed to be very helpful, among which comments by Gilles Campagnolo, Christian List and John Weymark. While in Lund, I also greatly benefitted from conversations with Adrian Miroiu. Finally, I am very grateful to an Associate Editor of this journal for excellent suggestions and for detecting some very annoying slips.

The number of papers published in Social Choice and Welfare has tremendously increased over the years. This paper is a subjective overview of the parallel development of the journal and the subjects it covers.

In a previous paper, we established necessary and sufficient conditions for a given binary fuzzy relation to be representable by a utility function. In this article, we construct a crisp order topology associated to a given weakly complete fuzzy pre-order and introduce the notion of “continuous fuzzy pre-order.” We show that this new condition and the conditions introduced in the previous paper are together necessary and sufficient for a numerical representation of a given weakly complete fuzzy pre-order by a continuous utility function.

Editors' note: Ian Little is one of the towering figures in welfare economics. His numerous contributions, which include his analysis of the language of normative economics, his classic paper on the significance of K. J. Arrow's book on social choice, his work, jointly with J. Mirrlees, on project evaluation, and his exploration of the compensation criteria, have deeply influenced our thinking in both theoretical and applied welfare economics. We believe that Ian Little's reflections on welfare economics and his own contributions to it will be of much interest to the readers of Social Choice and Welfare. We are, therefore, pleased to publish this interview which Prasanta K. Pattanaik and Maurice Salles had with Ian Little in September 2004.

In 1980 Rubinstein introduced a new solution concept for voting games called the stability set which incorporates the idea that before entering into a possibly winning coalition with respect to some pair of alternatives, a voter will consider what might happen in the future. He showed that if the voters' preferences are given by linear orders the stability set is non-empty for a large class of voting games with finite sets of alternatives. We consider the case where indifference is allowed (preferences are then complete preorders) and show that the picture is then quite different. First, in the finite case, we obtain classification results for the non-emptiness of the stability set which are based on Nakamura's number. When preferences are continuous, we prove a general non-emptiness theorem and show that the set of profiles for which the stability set is non-empty is dense in the set of profiles.

Social choice and welfare economics are subjects at the frontier of many disciplines. Even if economics played the major role in their development, sociology, psychology and, principally, political science, mathematics and philosophy have been central for the manifold inventiveness of the employed methods and for the diversity of the studied topics. This phenomenon can be compared with game theory, a subject which has, of course, many connections with social choice and welfare. This fact is reflected by the disciplinary origins of the contributors to the subject and, as an anecdote, by the disciplinary origins of the board of editors of this journal. Philosophers are expected to contribute mainly to the study of social justice and related ethical questions. But there is a tradition among logicians for studying voting theory. A famous example is C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), even though the complete works of Dodgson on voting occupy only a few pages. A major recent example is Michael Dummett. Michael Dummett is famous among social choice theorists for his joint paper with Robin Farquharson published in Econometrica in 1961. Later he wrote two important books on voting (Dummett (1984, 1997); for an overview see Salles (2006)). But it must be outlined that Michael Dummett is also, and above all, one of the greatest contemporary philosophers whose work on the German logician Frege, on intuitionism, realism, anti-realism, justificationism has been central for the development of analytical philosophy in the second part of the last century and in this century (an example is the Symposium in a recent issue of Mind (see Peacocke (2005) and Dummett (2005)). Sir Michael Dummett is Wykeham Professor of Logic emeritus at Oxford University. His interview was conducted at New College, Oxford in September 2004.

International audience; The paper axiomatises a generalised utilitarian aggregation rule, under which different weights are assigned to utilities depending on the different rights involved. The relationship between actions, rights and the evaluation of utilities is investigated. Application is made to a famous example, Edwin-Angelina-the Judge, which appears in the social choice literature.

This paper examines the classes of inequality measures determined by three independence conditions concerning transfers of income. The weight function involved is adapted to obtain poverty measures. Copyright 1998 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

The local core of voting games is investigated from a genericity point of view. There exist preference profiles for which it is empty and there exist preference profiles for which the local core and its complement are both dense in the set of alternatives. Furthermore the subset of profiles having an empty local core is dense in the whole set of profiles. Some remarks on the choice of the topology are provided.

LetN be a set of individuals,A a closed bounded interval ofRe. Using a former result ofNakamura, it is shown that if every individual inN has a quasi-concave utility function overA, then a proper simple game has a non-empty core which is a convex set. In particular, the majority core is explicitly characterized. When every individual inN has a strictly quasi-concave utility function overA, then it is shown that the local core in a proper simple game is precisely the core.