Related papers: Belief-Averaged Relative Utilitarianism
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…
We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow's classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull of some finite set of alternatives. Individual and…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
Since Leonard Savage's epoch-making "Foundations of Statistics", Subjective Expected Utility Theory has been the presumptive model for decision-making. Savage provided an act-based axiomatization of standard expected utility theory. In this…
This paper studies preference aggregation under uncertainty in the multi-profile framework and characterizes a new class of aggregation rules that address classical concerns about Harsanyi's (1955) utilitarian rules. Our aggregation rules,…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
This paper provides a general framework to explore the possibility of agenda manipulation-proof and proper consensus-based preference aggregation rules, so powerfully called in doubt by a disputable if widely shared understanding of Arrow's…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
We characterize Pareto optimality via "near" weighted utilitarian welfare maximization. One characterization sequentially maximizes utilitarian welfare functions using a finite sequence of nonnegative and eventually positive welfare…
The First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics assumes that welfare-bearing agents are autonomous and implicitly relies on a binary distinction between autonomy and instrumentality. Welfare subjects are those who have autonomy and…
This paper analyzes a society composed of individuals who have diverse sets of beliefs (or models) and diverse tastes (or utility functions). It characterizes the model selection process of a social planner who wishes to aggregate…
We examine behavioral axioms in decision theory that are satisfied approximately rather than exactly. We demonstrate that in key domains -- decisions under risk, uncertainty, and intertemporal choice -- behavior that \emph{almost} satisfies…
We study three axioms in the model of constrained social choice under uncertainty where (i) agents have subjective expected utility preferences over acts and (ii) different states of nature have (possibly) different sets of available…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
We consider the social welfare function a la Arrow, where some voters are not qualified to evaluate some alternatives. Thus, the inputs of the social welfare function are the preferences of voters on the alternatives that they are qualified…
A dynamic model of collective consumption and saving decisions made by a finite number of agents with constant but different discount rates is developed. Collective utility is a weighted sum of individual utilities with time-varying utility…
In this paper we extend Savage's theory of decision-making under uncertainty from a classical environment into a non-classical one. We formulate the corresponding axioms and provide representation theorems for qualitative measures and…
We study the dynamics of opinions in a setting where a leader has a payoff that depends on agents' beliefs and where agents derive psychological utility from their beliefs. Agents sample a signal that maximises their utility and then…
Budget aggregation is a process in which citizens vote by declaring their individual ideal budget allocation, and a pre-determined rule aggregates all votes into a single outcome. Recent theoretical work has proposed various aggregation…