Kenneth Arrow

Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist and mathematician, known for his significant contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory. He was a co-recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972.

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.

  1. 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 3285th Greatest Book of All Time