The Non-Existence of Representative Agents

Matthew Jackson and Leeat Yariv
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Leeat Yariv: Princeton University

Working Papers from Princeton University. Economics Department.

Abstract: We characterize environments having a representative agent: an agent whose preferences over aggregate alternatives correspond to a weighted average of the population’s utilities for the disaggregated alternatives. The existence of a representative agent imposes strong restrictions on individual utility functions — requiring them to be linear in the allocation and additively separable in any parameter that characterizes agents’ preferences (e.g.; a risk aversion parameter; a discount factor; etc.).

Keywords: Representative Agents; Preference Aggregation; Revealed Preference; Collective Decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D03 D11 D71 D72 E24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
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Related works:
Working Paper: The Non-Existence of Representative Agents (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:econom:2020-74

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