Fair social orderings when agents have unequal production skills

We develop an approach which escapes Arrows impossibility by relying on information about agents indifference curves instead of utilities. In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we characterize social ordering functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information about individual preferences. These social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in skills, and equal access to resources for all preferences.We thank participants of the SCW conference in Vancouver (July 1998), of workshops at Cergy and Osnabrück, and of seminars at Tokyo (Hitotsubashi U.) and Caen. We are also grateful to an Associate Editor and two referees for their very helpful comments. Financial Support from European TMR Network FMRX-CT96-0055 is gratefully acknowledged.