Aggregating Wrong Preferences

Uzi Segal and Zhuzhu Zhou

No 1108, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: In a social choice setting, individuals may be unwilling to aggregate their preferences with what they regard as wrong preferences held by others because they lead to outcomes that harm themselves, harm others, are socially inefficient, or are morally unacceptable. People may still be willing to compromise with those who believe that although such preferences are wrong, society should nonetheless accept them. We offer two methods of two-level aggre- gation for such situations. In the first method, each member of society first aggregates the “corrected” individual preferences, and society then aggregates these aggregated views. In the second method, for each person, society first aggregates everyone’s views about that person’s preferences, and then aggregates the resulting individual “corrected” preferences. If these two methods yield the same social ranking, then the aggregation rule must be the sum of functions of the corrected utilities.

Keywords: Social welfare function; aggregation rule; spurious unanimity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D30 D60 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-16
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