ABSTRACT
In ‘Individual freedom and social choice’, Clemens Puppe relates the problem of ranking individuals’ opportunity sets on the basis of their freedom of choice to the issue of preferences aggregation. Although the connection may seem surprising, it derives quite naturally from a whole body of literature (see, e.g. Arrow [2], Foster [3], Kreps [8] and Pattanaik and Xu [11]) that locates the main reason for attaching importance to freedom of choice in the individual’s ignorance of the preferences used when choosing from an opportunity set. This ignorance is naturally modelled by a set of possible preference orderings that the individual could have when choosing from any particular opportunity set. Every preference from this set generates a unique ‘indirect utility ranking’ of opportunity sets in the usual fashion: set A is better than set B if A’s most preferred option is preferred to B’s most preferred option. In this sense, the exercise of generating a unique ranking of opportunity sets from the multiplicity of ‘indirect utility rankings’ bears a strong formal similarity with that of generating a unique (social) ranking from a profile of (individual) rankings of alternatives extensively examined in social choice theory.
