Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making [Paperback]

This book provides a unified and comprehensive study of welfarism, cooperative games, public decision making, and voting and social choice theory.A comprehensive presentation of problems of fair division, equitable cost-sharing, division of a joint benefit, or the choice of a truly democratic voting rule, all of which are subjects for dispute in technologically advanced democracies.A comprehensive presentation of problems of fair division, equitable cost-sharing, division of a joint benefit, or the choice of a truly democratic voting rule, all of which are subjects for dispute in technologically advanced democracies.Problems of fair division, equitable cost-sharing, division of a joint benefit, or the choice of a truly democratic voting rule are familiar subjects of dispute in technologically advanced democracies. This book provides a comprehensive and unified presentation of these technically heterogeneous subjects that are linked by common axioms.Foreword Amartya Sen; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Overview; Part I. Welfarism: 1. Egalitarianism versus utilitarianism; 2. Social welfare orderings; 3. Axiomatic bargaining; 4. Cost-sharing schemes and the core; 5. Values of cooperative games; Part III. Public decision mechanisms: 6. Equal versus proportional sharing; 7. Regulated monopoly; 8. Strategyproof mechanisms; 9. Majority voting and scoring methods; 10. Strategyproofness and core stability; 11. Aggregation of preferences; Bibliography; Indexes. A most valuable contribution to the essence of the social sciences, and especially of economics: how agents, be they collective or individual, make choices. Georges Bernard, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique This book is a real pedagogical tour de force...it is beautifully produced thanks to the Econometric Society and Cambridge University Press. It is not only highly recommended but, in the reviewer's opinion, an obligatory reading for every theoretically inclined economist or political scientist. MaulÃ