III - Production
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
Summary
How does the study of the fair division problem carried out in Part II generalize to problems involving production? This is the topic of this part of the book. More precisely, we consider that the economy is endowed with a stock of private goods that can be used to produce other commodities, which can be public or private goods. In Chapter 8 and the beginning of Chapter 9, the initial stock of private goods is legitimately owned by the agents themselves, and the problem boils down to identifying fair ways of jointly using the production technology. In Chapter 8, the commodity that can be produced is a public good, whereas in Chapter 9 it is a private one.
The general picture that will emerge from these chapters is, first, that the specific features of the problems involving production allow us to define several specific fairness conditions, which, in turn, yield specific social ordering functions. We take it as an illustration that the approach we propose is quite flexible and takes advantage of the richness of a model to offer richer possible definitions of what is fair. Second, the developments in these chapters also confirm some key conclusions of the previous chapters, and, in particular, confirm that our axiomatic analysis ends up justifying social ordering functions that give absolute priority to the worst-off.
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- A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare , pp. 133 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011