After Part I, which introduced the approach, its general features, and its relationship with the rest of welfare economics, we are now ready to start the real work – namely, constructing social criteria for the evaluation of allocations. Part II is about the same model that served as a workhorse for the generalities of Part I. Even though the division problem is not the most exciting when one is eager to say something about the pressing social problems of the real world, this model is very convenient to understand the basic concepts.

The two subapproaches that are highlighted in the next chapter appear to haunt all the models that have been examined so far, and they reflect the classic divide, in the theory of fair allocation, between egalitarian-equivalence and the Walrasian approach. The former evaluates individual situations by looking at specific parts of indifference curves that are located in well-chosen parts of the consumption set, whereas the latter compares individuals in terms of budget sets that are either their actual budget sets or hypothetical budget sets that are suitably related to the general configuration of the allocation under consideration. These two ways of analyzing individual situations in the context of social evaluation are so basic and natural that one may suspect that any conceivable approach that similarly ignores utility information and focuses on indifference curves and resource bundles must in some way derive from one of them.