Social ordering functions

We present the Fair Social Ordering approach to policy assessment. In an economic model, a Social Ordering Function (SOF) associates each economy in the domain with a complete ranking of the allocations. We describe the main achievements of the SOF theory. We present two applications, which show how SOF's can be used to evaluate policies. The first application concerns labor income taxation. The second application concerns the measurement of poverty. Finally, we discuss the relationship between the SOF approach and some other approaches to the construction of criteria to evaluate policies.