Abstract
The theoretical literature on social welfare judgement has always been concerned with the determination of common decision criteria that integrate, in some way or another, the different preferences of participating individuals. The aggregation problem has become a fundamental subject in the formal analysis of the welfare assessment of public utility systems. In planning terms, the aggregation problem can be formulated as the problem of deriving a social welfare ordering among planning alternatives. The major purpose of this paper is to discuss the specific conditions and axioms underlying various kinds of welfare assessment models, and to give a critical review of that part of social welfare theory which has strong ethical implications for the public/private provision of public utilities.
