Bayesian social aggregation with accumulating evidence

Marcus Pivato

Journal of Economic Theory, 2022, vol. 200, issue C

Abstract: How should we aggregate the ex ante preferences of Bayesian agents with heterogeneous beliefs? Suppose the state of the world is described by a random process that unfolds over time. Different agents have different beliefs about the probabilistic laws governing this process. As new information is revealed over time by the process, agents update their beliefs and preferences via Bayes rule. Consider a Pareto principle that applies only to preferences which remain stable in the long run under these updates. I show that this “eventual Pareto” principle implies that the social planner must be a utilitarian. But it does not impose any relationship between the beliefs of the individuals and those of the planner, except for a weak compatibility condition.

Keywords: Subjective expected utility; Utilitarian; Ex ante Pareto; Stochastic process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053121002167
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Bayesian social aggregation with accumulating evidence (2022)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:200:y:2022:i:c:s0022053121002167

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105399

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().