Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity

Antoine Billot and Vassili Vergopoulos ()
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Vassili Vergopoulos: Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne - Paris School of Economics, https://centredeconomiesorbonne.univ-paris1.fr

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

Abstract: Harsanyi's axiomatic justification of utilitarianism is extended to a framework with subjective and heterogenous priors. Contrary to the existing literature on aggregation of preferences under uncertainty, society is here allowed to formulate probability judgements, not on the actual state of the world as individuals do, but rather on the opinion they each have on the actual state. An extended Pareto condition is then proposed that characterizes the social utility function as a convex combination of individual ones and the social prior as the independent product of individual ones

Keywords: Utilitarianism; prior heterogeneity; Pareto condition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/CES2014/14049.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity (2014)
Working Paper: Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mse:cesdoc:14049

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