On Initial Conferment of Individual Rights

This version May 2008An extended social choice framework is proposed for the analysis of initial conferment of individual rights. It captures the intuitive conception of decisionmaking procedure as a carrier of intrinsic value along with the instrumental usefulness thereof in realizing valuable culmination outcomes. Our model of social decision-making consists of two stages. In the first stage, the society decides on the game form rights-system to be promulgated. In the second stage, the promulgated game form rights-system, coupled with the revealed profile of individual preference orderings over the set of culmination outcomes, determines a fully-fledged game, the play of which determines a culmination outcome at the Nash equilibrium. A set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a democratic social choice procedure, which chooses a game form in the first stage that is not only liberal, efficient and Nash solvable, but also uniformly workable for every revealed profile of individual preference orderings over the set of culmination outcomes, is identified.41 p