Social Choice and Individual Values (Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. Monograph no. 12) by Kenneth Arrow - 1951

New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1951. First Edition, First Printing. Cloth. Very good +/missing. A very good plus, true first edition hardcover published in 1951 --- scarce in this edition. Binding is sturdy, square and tight. Blue cloth boards with yellow Commission seal stamped on cover. Mild rubbing to bottom front corner, slight shelf wear to head of spine. Marginalia and ink underlining present on text. Previous owner's name on FFE. Missing dust jacket. xi, 99 pp. including index. Octavo, 6 x 9 1/4 inches tall. Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's monograph Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 2nd ed., 1963) and a theorem within it created modern social choice theory, a rigorous melding of social ethics and voting theory with an economic flavor. Somewhat formally, the "social choice" in the title refers to Arrow's representation of how social values from the set of individual orderings would be implemented under the constitution. Less formally, each social choice corresponds to the feasible set of laws passed by a "vote" (the set of orderings) under the constitution even if not every individual voted in favor of all the laws.The work culminated in what Arrow called the "General Possibility Theorem," better known thereafter as Arrow's (impossibility) theorem. The theorem states that, absent restrictions on either individual preferences or neutrality of the constitution to feasible alternatives, there exists no social choice rule that satisfies a set of plausible requirements. The result generalizes the voting paradox, which shows that majority voting may fail to yield a stable outcome. ---wikipedia