On the Extension of the Utilitarian and Suppes–Sen Social Welfare Relations to Infinite Utility Streams

摘要

Extensions of a utilitarian and a Suppes–Sen grading principle defined on infinite utility streams are characterized with a stronger notion of Anonymity and without any consistency postulate. The relative merits of the Extended Utilitarian relation are discussed and its rankings are compared with those of the overtaking criterion and the Basu–Mitra Utilitarian relation.I am indebted to Tapan Mitra for several insightful discussions on the subject matter of this paper and on intertemporal social choice theory in general. I thank a Managing Editor for meticulously reading through two versions of the paper and two anonymous referees of this journal for providing detailed comments, pointing out errors and suggesting expositional changes. I also thank Kaushik Basu for his comments. I am responsible for any remaining errors.