Relative utilitarianism under uncertainty

Yves Sprumont ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2019, vol. 53, issue 4, No 5, 639 pages

Abstract: Abstract In the context of uncertainty, belief-weighted relative utilitarianism consists in comparing acts according to a weighted sum of the (0, 1) -normalized subjective expected utilities they yield. The weights may change with the profile of beliefs but do not depend upon the profile of individual utilities for the outcomes. This class of social welfare functions is characterized by the Pareto principle, the sure-thing principle, a continuity condition, and an independence condition requiring that the social ranking of two acts is unaffected by the addition of an outcome that leaves everyone’s best and worst outcomes unchanged. The weights must be constant if the social ranking of constant acts is independent of individual beliefs. Anonymity then pins down plain relative utilitarianism: acts are compared according the sum of (0, 1)-normalized subjective expected utilities they generate.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00355-019-01202-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:sochwe:v:53:y:2019:i:4:d:10.1007_s00355-019-01202-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-019-01202-9

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().