We have seen in Chapter 3 that, according to many empirical studies, information on individual welfare levels alone does not suffice to capture the moral intricacies of real-world distribution problems. Recent developments in social choice theory also depart from the traditional welfarist assumptions. Overly simplifying, one could say that these new approaches have some common characteristics. Many authors working in the area reject the meaningfulness of interpersonal utility comparisons. They try to introduce into their formal models the necessary information that is missing in the more traditional approach. As they accept that justice or fairness evaluations may depend on the economic and social context, they formulate their problems within a richer description of the economic environment. This richness implies going beyond utility information. Solutions and decision rules are often derived within the axiomatic setting of cooperative game theory. At the same time there is a strong and growing interest in incentive compatibility and in mechanism design, and an intensive search for non-cooperative foundations of cooperative solutions. In many models the concept of individual responsibility plays a crucial role, although it can be defined in different ways.

In spite of the fact that these theoretical developments have taken place independently of the questionnaire studies, some of the work that was described in Chapter 3 (notably Yaari and Bar-Hillel, 1984) has been influential in strengthening the motivation to look for new approaches. Moreover, empirical social choice, as we define it, has probably a more important role to play in these new approaches than in traditional social choice. The ‘new’ axioms and solution concepts often relate to everyday intuitions. It is easier to construct cases that fit a rich description of the economic environment than to formulate questions at the highly abstract level of Arrovian social choice theory. Moreover, there really is room for choice. Different sets of axioms, often incompatible across sets, lead to different theoretically equally respectable solutions and it is not clear which of these axioms or solutions come closest to the ethical judgments of citizens. However, the empirical work has just started and much remains to be done. In this chapter we will focus on the few questions that have already been analysed to some extent. We will first discuss the different interpretations of individual responsibility and the way it has been taken up in the formal models. We will then focus on one interesting example of a specific distributive issue: the claims (or estate division) problem. Finally, we will comment on the differences between dividing benefits versus harms. Chapter 5 will be devoted to applications in one specific domain, that of health. Non-welfarist approaches have been prominent in health economics from the very beginning and Chapter 5 is therefore a natural continuation of Chapter 4.