On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty
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Working paper
Issue number:
2005.12
Publisher:
Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne
Year:
2005
We provide a general theorem on the aggregation of preferences under uncertainty. We study, in the Anscombe-Aumann setting a wide class of preferences, that includes most known models of decision under uncertainty (and state-dependent versions of these models.) We prove that aggregation is possible and necessarily linear if (society's) preferences are "smooth". The latter means that society cannot have a non-neutral attitude towards uncer-tainty on a subclass of acts. A corollary to our theorem is that it is not possible to aggregate maxmin expected utility maximizers, even when they all have the same set of priors. We show that dropping a weak notion of monotonicity on society's preferences allows one to restore the possibility of aggregation of non-smooth preferences.