The relative importance given to different members of a society in the evaluation of social welfare. As an example, let the utility level of consumer h be denoted U^h and define the social welfare function

The value of α‎^h is the distributional weight given to consumer h. The higher is the value of α‎^h relative to the values for other consumers, the more important is the utility of h in the calculation of social welfare. For the utilitarian social welfare function all the distributional weights are equal and are usually normalized to 1. For the Rawlsian, or maximin, social welfare function the distributional weights are equal to 0 for all consumers except the consumer with the lowest utility level who is assigned a weight of 1.