Kenneth Arrow
Kenneth Arrow was an influential economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks in 1972. He made significant contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory, and his work on social choice theory introduced the 'Arrow's Impossibility Theorem'. His academic career was largely spent at Stanford University, and his insights have had a profound impact on modern economic theory.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. Social Choice And Individual Values
The book in question is a seminal work in the field of economics and political theory that explores the complexities of collective decision-making processes. It presents a rigorous mathematical analysis of social choice mechanisms, demonstrating the challenges of creating a social welfare function that can consistently reflect individual preferences. The author introduces the "impossibility theorem," which states that no voting system can convert the ranked preferences of individuals into a community-wide ranking while simultaneously meeting a set of reasonable criteria, such as non-dictatorship, unrestricted domain, universality, and independence of irrelevant alternatives. This groundbreaking work has profound implications for understanding the limitations of democratic institutions and the potential for preference aggregation in making fair and rational collective choices.
The 3266th Greatest Book of All Time
