On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty

Thibault Gajdos (), Jean-Marc Tallon () and Jean-Christophe Vergnaud ()

Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL

Abstract: We provide a general theorem on the aggregation of preferences under uncertainty. We study, in the Anscombe-Aumann setting a wide class of preferences, that includes most known models of decision under uncertainty (and state-dependent versions of these models). We prove that aggregation is possible and necessarily linear if (society's) preferences are "smooth". The latter means that society cannot have a non-neutral attitude towards uncertainty on a subclass of acts. A corollary to our theorem is that it is not possible to aggregate maxmin expected utility maximizers, even when they all have the same set of priors. We show that dropping a weak notion of monotonicity on society's preferences allows one to restore the possibility of aggregation of non-smooth preferences.

Keywords: Aggregation; Harsanyi; uncertainty; multiple priors. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-02
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00193578/en/
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/19/35/78/PDF/V05012.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:cesptp:halshs-00193578_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) from HAL
Series data maintained by CCSD ().