Belief-averaging and relative utilitarianism

Florian Brandl

Journal of Economic Theory, 2021, vol. 198, issue C

Abstract: We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare function that averages the agents' beliefs and sums up their utility functions, normalized to have the same range. The first distinguishing axiom requires positive association of society's preferences with the agents' preferences for acts about which beliefs agree. The second is a weakening of Arrow's independence of irrelevant alternatives that only applies to non-redundant acts.

Keywords: Uncertainty; Subjective expected utility; Pareto optimality; Relative utilitarianism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:198:y:2021:i:c:s002205312100185x

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105368

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