Freedom of choice: the leximax criterion in economic environments

Abstract

Many recent works have investigated the question of extending a preference over a set of alternatives to its power set, as a way to provide a formal representation of the notion of freedom of choice. In general, the results are limited to the finite case, which excludes the case of economic environments. This paper deals with the possibility of extending those results to the context where the basic set of alternatives is the n-dimensional Euclidean space. We present an extension of the leximax criterion of Bossert, Pattanaik and Xu (1994) on this more general framework. This characterization result opens the possibility of application of the literature on freedom of choice to standard economic environments.