Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: May, 1999, Volume 67, Issue 3

Relative Utilitarianism

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0262.00033
p. 471-498

Amrita Dhillon, Jean‐François Mertens

‘If empirically meaningful interpersonal comparisons have to be based on indifference maps, as we have argued, then the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives must be violated. The information which enables us to assert that individual prefers to more strongly than prefers to must be based on comparisons by and of and not only to each other but also to other alternatives. . In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. ‘Relative Utilitarianism’ consists of first normalizing individual von Neumann‐Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them.


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