Aggregating sets of von Neumann-Morgenstern

Eric Danan, Thibault Gajdos () and Jean-Marc Tallon

Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne

Abstract: We analyze the aggregation problem without the assumption that individuals and society have fully determined and observable preferences. More precisely, we endow individuals ans society with sets of possible von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions over lotteries. We generalize the classical neutrality assumption to this setting and characterize the class of neutral social welfare function. This class turns out to be considerably broader for indeterminate than for determinate utilities, where it basically reduces to utilitarianism. In particular, aggregation rules may differ by the relationship between individual and social indeterminacy. We characterize several subclasses of neutral aggregation rules and show that utilitarian rules are those that yield the least indeterminate social utilities, although they still fail to systematically yield a determinate social utility

Keywords: Aggregation; vNM utility; indeterminacy; neutrality; utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2010-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:10068

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