Conversations on Social Choice and Welfare Theory - Vol. 1

This volume presents interviews that have been conducted from the 1980s to the present with important scholars of social choice and welfare theory. Starting with a brief history of social choice and welfare theory written by the book editors, it features 15 conversations with four Nobel Laureates and other key scholars in the discipline.

The volume is divided into two parts. The first part presents four conversations with the founding fathers of modern social choice and welfare theory: Kenneth Arrow, John Harsanyi, Paul Samuelson, and Amartya Sen. The second part includes conversations with scholars who made important contributions to the discipline from the early 1970s onwards. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of economics, and the history of social choice and welfare theory in particular.

Maurice Salles is Professor (emeritus) of Economics at the University of Caen-Normandy (France). He was coordinating editor of the Springer journal Social Choice and Welfare from 1984 to 2011 and President of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in 2012/13. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer book series "Studies in Choice and Welfare". Moreover, Maurice is honorary research associate at CPNSS at the London School of Economics and member of the Murat Sertel Center at Bilgi University in Istanbul. He is presently working on the history of social choice theory, on (im)possibility of social choice with Nash independence of irrelevant alternatives and on the mathematical methods of social choice and voting theory.

Marc Fleurbaey is CNRS researcher and Professor at Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure (France). Until June 2020, he was Robert E. Kuenne Professor of Economics and Humanistic Studies and Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton University (USA). Author of Beyond GDP (with Didier Blanchet, OUP 2013), A Theory of Fairness and Social Welfare (with François Maniquet, CUP 2011), and Fairness, Responsibility and Welfare (OUP, 2008), he is one of the initiators of the International Panel on Social Progress, and lead author of its Manifesto for Social Progress (CUP 2018). He is a former editor of Social Choice and Welfareand Economics and Philosophy. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Springer book series "Studies in Choice and Welfare".