A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare

Marc Fleurbaey is a Research Director of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and serves on the staff of CERSES, the joint research entity of the CNRS and the Université Paris Descartes. He first worked at INSEE, taught subsequently at the Universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Pau, and as of 2011 is a professor at Princeton University. Professor Fleurbaey is a research associate at CORE at the Université Catholique de Louvain, at Sciences-Po in Paris, and at IDEP in Marseilles, and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He is a former editor of the journal Economics and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) and is currently a managing editor of Social Choice and Welfare. He is the author, editor or coeditor of seven books, including Fairness, Responsibility, and Welfare (2008) and Justice, Political Liberalism, and Utilitarianism: Themes from Harsanyi and Rawls (with Maurice Salles and John Weymark, Cambridge University Press, 2008). His papers on normative and public economics have appeared in leading journals such as Econometrica the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Economic Theory. François Maniquet is Professor of Economics at CORE at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium, and teaches part time at the University of Warwick, UK. He served as an FNRS research associate at the University of Namur, Belgium, until 2005. Professor Maniquet has been a visiting scholar at several research centers, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2001–2. He was awarded the Social Choice and Welfare Prize in 2004, and he received the Koç Prize for the best paper in the Review of Economic Design that same year. Professor Maniquet has published papers on welfare economics, public economics, game theory and political economics in eminent journals such as Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Theory and the American Journal of Political Science. He is currently one of the editors of the Cambridge University Press journal Economics and Philosophy. Professor Maniquet was recently awarded the Francqui Prize, the highest scientific distinction in Belgium.

'Fleurbaey and Maniquet are among the outstanding scholars in the development of formal theories of social choice and justice today. Their many original contributions and synthesis, in the present volume, are masterly and go well beyond what can be said in the usual philosophical language. The concepts of fair and efficient resource allocations have been enriched by their work.' Kenneth J. Arrow, Stanford University and Nobel Laureate in Economics

• Preface; Introduction; Part I. Basics: 1. A contribution to welfare economics; 2. Efficiency versus equality; 3. Priority to the worst-off; 4. The informational basis of social orderings; Part II. Distribution: 5. Fair distribution of divisible goods: two approaches; 6. Specific domains; 7. Extensions; Part III. Production: 8. Public good; 9. Private good; 10. Unequal skills; 11. Income taxation; Conclusions; Proofs.