Pareto efficiency

Uncommon card · No. 83830

In welfare economics, a Pareto improvement formalizes the idea of an outcome being "better in every possible way". A change is called a Pareto improvement if it leaves at least one person in society better off without leaving anyone else worse off than they were before. A situation is called Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal if all possible Pareto improvements have already been made; in other words, there are no longer any ways left to make one person better off without making some other person worse off. In social choice theory, the same concept is sometimes called the unanimity principle, which says that if everyone in a society (non-strictly) prefers A to B, society as a whole also non-strictly prefers A to B. The Pareto frontier consists of all Pareto-efficient situations. In addition to the context of efficiency in allocation, the concept of Pareto efficiency also arises in the context of efficiency in production vs. x-inefficiency: a set of outputs of goods is Pareto efficient if...

Read on Wikipedia