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: multiple priors; uncertainty; Harsanyi; aggregation; agrégation; incertitude; croyances multiples (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-02
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00193578
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in 2005

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Related works:
Working Paper: On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty (2005)
Working Paper: On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty (2005)
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