INTRODUCTION

The evaluation of allocations of resources in a given context should depend on the characteristics of the context – in particular, the preferences of the population. This is why the object of our study is a social ordering function (SOF), which specifies, for each economy in an admissible domain, a complete ranking of the corresponding allocations. As stated in the introduction, we study social ordering functions in distribution models, with divisible or indivisible goods, as well as in production models of a private or a public good. This study is developed in Parts II and III. In this work, fairness is interpreted as resource equality, but there are different ways of specifying this notion – in particular, in relation to the specific features of the environment, so the social ordering functions that end up being selected do not have much in common. Some partial results, however, turn out to be general in the sense that they have their counterparts in each of the studied models.

In this first part of the book, we present and discuss these general and basic results. They provide two insights into the possibilities and limitations surrounding the construction of social ordering functions. The first concerns the way in which resource equality requirements need to be defined to be compatible with basic efficiency principles. The second lesson concerns the degree of inequality aversion that is compatible with efficiency and informational simplicity requirements.