Domain Conditions in Social Choice Theory

WULF GAERTNER is Professor of Economics at the University of Osnabrück. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has published extensively on social choice theory in leading journals. He is one of the managing editors of the journal Social Choice and Welfare.

'The domain conditions in social choice theory have a history of about half a century, going back to the classic paper of Duncan Black published in 1948. Over this period, a large number of writers have explored various aspects of the subject. Gaertner's survey provides an exceptionally lucid and comprehensive account of this diverse literature. Gaertner's exposition brings out the major intuitive themes in a very clear fashion, while paying meticulous attention to the technical details of individual results. Readers in search of an introduction to the literature, as well as researchers looking for an authoritative book of reference on the subject, should find the book very helpful.' Prasanta K. Pattanaik, University of California, Riverside

• Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Notation, definitions and two fundamental theorems; 3. The existence of collective choice rules under exclusion conditions for finite sets of discrete alternatives; 4. Arrovian social welfare functions, nonmanipulable voting procedures and stable group decision functions; 5. Restrictions on the distribution of individuals' preferences; 6. The existence of social choice rules in n-dimensional continuous space; 7. Concluding remarks; 8. References; Indexes.