Focusing on social choice theory, this textbook presents its concepts and results clearly for a broad audience without requiring prior knowledge of mathematical logic or relational algebra. It maintains rigorous standards, providing detailed proofs instead of omitting them, and includes numerous examples to clarify key ideas. Additionally, the book features a wealth of exercises with complete solutions, allowing readers to assess their comprehension effectively.
The book delves into the conditions under which various binary social decision rules produce rational social preferences, highlighting the implications of the Arrow and Gibbard theorems. It discusses the independence of irrelevant alternatives and the weak Pareto criterion, revealing that many non-oligarchic rules fail to ensure quasi-transitive social preferences due to configurations of individual preferences. The text also addresses the famous voting paradox linked to majority rule and seeks to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for achieving transitivity in social preferences.
This book focuses on the analysis of liability rules of tort law from an efficiency perspective, presenting a comprehensive analysis of these rules in a self-contained and rigorous yet accessible manner. It establishes general results on the efficiency of liability rules, including complete characterizations of efficient liability rules and efficient incremental liability rules. The book also establishes that the untaken precaution approach and decoupled liability are incompatible with efficiency. The economic analysis of tort law has established that for efficiency it is necessary that each party to the interaction must be made to internalize the harm resulting from the interaction. The characterization and impossibility theorems presented in this book establish that, in addition to internalization of the harm by each party, there are two additional requirements for efficiency. Firstly, rules must be immune from strategic manipulation. Secondly, rules must entail closure with respect to the parties involved in the interaction giving rise to the negative externality, i.e., the liability must not be decoupled.