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Social choice with approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being

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Author Info
Pivato, Marcus
Abstract

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all Pareto-efficient outcomes are equally socially desirable. We compromise between these two extremes, by developing a model of `approximate' interpersonal comparisons of well-being, in terms of an incomplete preorder on the space of psychophysical states. We then define and characterize `approximate' versions of the classical egalitarian and utilitarian social welfare orderings. We show that even very weak assumptions about interpersonal comparability can yield preorders on the space of social alternatives which, while incomplete, are far more complete than the Pareto preorder (e.g. they select relatively small subsets of the Pareto frontier as being `socially optimal'). We also develop a variant of Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem.

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Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number 17060.

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Date of creation: 01 Sep 2009
Date of revision: 09 Sep 2009
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:17060

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Related research
Keywords: interpersonal comparisons of utility; interpersonal comparisons of well-being; social choice; social welfare; approximate egalitarian; approximate utilitarian; Suppes-Sen;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General

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