Abstract
This paper considers situations of social choice where the resolution of the uncertainty affecting each individual is independent of the resolution of the uncertainty affecting all other individuals. Individuals as well as society itself have Subjective Expected Utility preferences, and society conforms to a set of Pareto-like requirements. In this case, the social utility function must be a convex combination of individual utility functions, thereby extending the logic of Harsanyi’s (JPE 63:309–321, 1955) seminal aggregation theorem. Moreover, the social probabilistic beliefs must be the independent product of individual probabilistic beliefs.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Eric Danan, Itzhak Gilboa, Jean-François Laslier, Marcus Pivato, Jean-Marc Tallon and Stéphane Zuber for stimulating discussions, and the participants of the d-tea 2014 workshop and internal seminar of the LabEx mmedii for helpful comments. Our special thanks are due to Philippe Mongin, whose comments on an earlier draft considerably improved the paper.
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Billot, A., Vergopoulos, V. Aggregation of Paretian preferences for independent individual uncertainties. Soc Choice Welf 47, 973–984 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-016-1001-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-016-1001-0