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When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertainty

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  • Charles F. Manski

Abstract

Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which the argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision making when each member of a population has the same objective function, which depends on an unknown state of nature. If agents knew the state of nature, they would make the same decision. However, they may have different beliefs or may use different decision criteria. Hence, they may choose different actions even though they share the same objective. Let the set of feasible actions be convex and the objective function be concave in actions, for all states of nature. Then Jensen's inequality implies that consensus choice of the mean privately-chosen action yields a larger aggregate payoff than does individualistic decision making, in all states of nature. If payoffs are transferable, the aggregate payoff from consensus choice may be allocated to Pareto dominate individualistic decision making, in all states of nature. I develop these ideas. I also use Jensen's inequality to show that a planner with the power to assign actions to the members of the population should not diversify. Finally, I give a version of the collective choice result that holds with consensus choice of the median rather than mean action.
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Suggested Citation

  • Charles F. Manski, 2010. "When consensus choice dominates individualism: Jensen's inequality and collective decisions under uncertainty," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 1(1), pages 187-202, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:quante:v:1:y:2010:i:1:p:187-202
    DOI: QE5
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    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Kniesner & W. Viscusi & James Ziliak, 2010. "Policy relevant heterogeneity in the value of statistical life: New evidence from panel data quantile regressions," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 40(1), pages 15-31, February.
    2. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2014. "Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(2), pages 375-408, June.
    3. Moshe Ben-Akiva & André Palma & Daniel McFadden & Maya Abou-Zeid & Pierre-André Chiappori & Matthieu Lapparent & Steven Durlauf & Mogens Fosgerau & Daisuke Fukuda & Stephane Hess & Charles Manski & Ar, 2012. "Process and context in choice models," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 23(2), pages 439-456, June.
    4. Konstadinos G. Goulias & Ram M. Pendyala, 2014. "Choice context," Chapters, in: Stephane Hess & Andrew Daly (ed.), Handbook of Choice Modelling, chapter 5, pages 101-130, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    5. Nir Billfeld & Moshe Kim, 2019. "Semiparametric correction for endogenous truncation bias with Vox Populi based participation decision," Papers 1902.06286, arXiv.org.
    6. Malte Knüppel & Fabian Krüger, 2022. "Forecast uncertainty, disagreement, and the linear pool," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(1), pages 23-41, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • H42 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Publicly Provided Private Goods

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