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On the impossibility of preference aggregation under uncertainty

Working paper
Author/s: 
Thibault Gajdos, Jean-Marc Tallon, Jean-Christophe Vergnau
Issue number: 
2005.12
Publisher: 
Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne
Year: 
2005
PDF [1]
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.
Tags: 
Social Choice [2]

Source URL:http://coalitiontheory.net/content/impossibility-preference-aggregation-under-uncertainty

Links
[1] ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/cahiers2005/V05012.pdf [2] http://coalitiontheory.net/research-areas/social-choice