Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity

Antoine Billot and Vassili Vergopoulos ()
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Vassili Vergopoulos: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement

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Abstract: Harsanyi's axiomatic justification of utilitarianism is extended to a framework with subjective and heterogenous priors. Contrary to the existing literature on aggregation of preferences under uncertainty, society is here allowed to formulate probability judgements, not on the actual state of the world as individuals do, but rather on the opinion they each have on the actual state. An extended Pareto condition is then proposed that characterizes the social utility function as a convex combination of individual ones and the social prior as the independent product of individual ones.

Keywords: utilitarianism; prior heterogeneity; Pareto condition; utilitarisme; hétérogénéité préalable; condition de Pareto (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-upt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-01021399v1
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Published in 2014

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Related works:
Working Paper: Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity (2014)
Working Paper: Utilitarianism with Prior Heterogeneity (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-01021399

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