Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making

This book provides a unified and comprehensive study of welfarism, cooperative games, public decision making, and voting and social choice theory.

Hervi Moulin (Author)

9780521360555, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 November 1988

348 pages, 40 b/w illus. 2 tables
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.3 cm, 0.585 kg

'This book is a real pedagogical tour de force ... it is beautifully produced thanks to the Econometric Society and Cambridge University Press. It is not only highly recommended but, in the reviewer's opinion, obligatory reading for every theoretically-inclined economist or political scientist.' Maurice Salles, University of Caen

Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making provides a unified and comprehensive study of welfarism, cooperative games, public decision making, and voting and social choice theory - technically heterogeneous subjects that are linked by common axioms. Hervé Moulin studies these areas from an axiomatic perspective. Every axiom conveys a certain ethical principle (e.g. 'one man one vote', or 'to each according to his contribution'). Axiomatic theory examines the compatibility of various combinations of axioms. The book describes recent successes of this method. It gives many examples of the axiomatic approach, ranging from the construction of numerical indices for measuring inequality, to the pricing of a regulated monopoly, to the comparison of various voting rules. The book will be useful to mathematical modellers, especially those interested in economics and political science.

Foreword Amartya Sen
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Overview
Part I. Welfarism: 1. Egalitarianism versus utilitarianism
2. Social welfare orderings
3. Axiomatic bargaining
4. Cost-sharing schemes and the core
5. Values of cooperative games
Part III. Public decision mechanisms: 6. Equal versus proportional sharing
7. Regulated monopoly
8. Strategyproof mechanisms
9. Majority voting and scoring methods
10. Strategyproofness and core stability
11. Aggregation of preferences
Bibliography
Indexes.

Subject Areas: Microeconomics [KCC]