The evaluation of allocations of resources, distributions of well-being, and public policies is a pervasive need in economics and a frequent activity of economists. This is, however, generally considered a difficult and hazardous exercise. The danger is not just the risk of mixing value judgments and factual assessments. It is also, perhaps primarily, the risk of getting lost in the morass of the controversies and impossibility theorems of the field that one can broadly call normative economics. However, the development of this field in the past century has been impressive, and has provided very powerful analytical tools. In particular, the theory of social choice and the theory of fair allocation have, separately, proposed an array of promising concepts and methods. In this book we put the concepts of these two theories to use and propose a general theory of social criteria for economic allocation problems.

In a nutshell, then, this book studies the elaboration of criteria for the evaluation of social and economic situations, and the application of such criteria to the search for optimal public policies. Several broad objectives are assigned to the criteria developed in our analysis.

First, the criteria should be sufficiently comprehensive so when they declare one situation to be preferable to another, there is a sense in which this evaluation takes account of all relevant considerations and is not merely a judgment that the considered situation is better in only one respect.