Social decision making in the presence of complex goals, ethics and the environment

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1979
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 978 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0040-5833
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00126338

✦ Synopsis

We explore the development of schemes for aggregating the preferences of individuals who will be jointly and individually affected by decisions which are determined, at least in part, by these aggregated preferences. We use, as the aggregating rule, the weighted sum of individual cardinal utilities. We are able to establish that this is the unique choice under conditions which are somewhat weaker than those used by Harsanyi. We introduce 'conditional utilities', which are cardinal utility functions depending upon both the present state of the world and the possible actions of the decision maker. We adduce both 'moral' and 'psychological' arguments to support this concept. We explore several schemes for the determination of the weights in the aggregating rule, and argue that the procedures involved may be 'fair' in certain limited situations, even though general interpersonal comparisons of utility cannot be justified. We describe a class of decision problems having a layered structure in which the aggregating rule is intermediary between the affected individuals and the decision making agency.