interpersonal comparisons
Comparing the welfare of one individual with that of another. The welfare level of an individual is measured by a utility function. Utility can be ordinal so that it is no more than a numbering of ...
interpersonal utility comparisons
Many theories of social welfare recognize that concepts of welfare or well-being (utility in economic terms) differ among persons and societies, but nonetheless require that comparisons between these ...
cardinal utility
A utility function that can be subjected to a positive affine transformation without altering the implied preference order. A positive affine transformation applied to the initial utility function U ...
equal sacrifice
The principle that the tax burden should be allocated across individuals so that each makes an equal sacrifice. The difficulty with applying this principle is the definition and measurement of ...
ordinal utility
A utility function is ordinal if it can be subjected to any positive strictly monotonic transformation without altering the preferences it represents. Consider the preferences of a consumer depicted ...
James Griffin
(1933– ).Moral philosopher best known for work on well-being, interpersonal comparison of well-being, and consequentialism. His first book was Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism (Oxford, 1964). In ...
high and low involvement
1. The degree of cognitive effort or elaboration required on the part of the audience in relation to the form of the message. Some texts demand more active interpretation than others, even within the ...
collective choice
The process of aggregating individual preferences into social preferences in order to make a social (or collective) choice from a set of alternatives. The most frequently encountered collective ...
Arrow's impossibility theorem
The theorem provides a proof that no perfect process exists for aggregating individual rankings of alternatives into a collective (or social) ranking. An example of an aggregation process is majority ...
Pareto principle
A principle of welfare economics derived from the writings of Vilfredo Pareto, which states that a legitimate welfare improvement occurs when a particular change makes at least one person better off, ...
