The Impossibility of the Almost Pareto Principles

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that even a minimal form of the Pareto principle, called the almost weak Pareto, leads to violations of acyclicity and inconsistency issues in social choice, highlighting fundamental limitations.

Contribution

It introduces the almost weak Pareto principle and proves its incompatibility with acyclicity and consistency in social choice frameworks.

Findings

Almost weak Pareto violates acyclicity in variable population settings.

Modified Pareto indifference conflicts with weak Pareto under this framework.

Results impact welfare evaluation methods and require strong assumptions for solutions.

Abstract

This study proposes a new efficiency requirement, a minimal almost weak Pareto principle, which says that x is socially better than y whenever the only one individual never prefers y to x, and all the others prefers x to y. Then, I show that even if the Pareto principle is modified into this harmless form, that seems sufficiently acceptable in the setting of social choice with variable population sizes or incomplete preferences, it violates acyclicity. Furthermore, it is shown that under this framework, a modified Pareto indifference and usual weak Pareto are inconsistent. These results are serious because they have a wide range of applications, not only to population economics and intergenerational equity analysis, but also to welfare evaluations of incomplete preferences and multi-dimensional well-being. In order to solve these problems, it is necessary to impose very strong assumptions on various contexts of social choice problems.