Fair social decision under uncertainty and belief disagreements

This paper aims to address two issues related to simultaneous aggregation of utilities and beliefs. The first one is related to how to integrate both inequality and uncertainty considerations into social decision making. The second one is related to how social decision should take disagreements in beliefs into account. To accomplish this, whereas individuals are assumed to abide by Savage model’s of subjective expected utility, society is assumed to prescribe, either to each individual when the ex ante individual well-being is favored or to itself when the ex post individual well-being is favored, acting in accordance with the maximin expected utility theory of Gilboa and Schmeidler (J Math Econ 18:141–153, 1989). Furthermore, it adapts an ex ante Pareto-type condition proposed by Gayer et al. (J Legal Stud 43:151–171, 2014), which says that a prospect Pareto dominates another one if the former gives a higher expected utility than the latter one, for each individual, for all individuals’ beliefs. In the context where the ex ante individual welfare is favored, our ex ante Pareto-type condition is shown to be equivalent to social utility taking the form of a MaxMinMin social welfare function, as well as to the individual set of priors being contained within the range of individual beliefs. However, when the ex post individual welfare is favored, the same Pareto-type condition is shown to be equivalent to social utility taking the form of a MaxMinMin social welfare function, as well as to the social set of priors containing only weighted averages of individual beliefs

Utilitarianism or Welfarism: Does it Make a Difference?

We show that it is possible to reconcile the utilitarian and welfarist principles under the\r\nrequirement of unanimity provided that the set of profiles over which the consensus is\r\nattained is rich enough. More precisely, we identify a closedness condition which, if satisfied\r\nby a class of n-tuples of utility functions, guarantees that the rankings of social states\r\ninduced by utilitarian and welfarist unanimities over that class are identical. We illustrate the\r\nimportance of the result for the measurement of unidimensional as well as multidimensional\r\ninequalities from a dominance point of viewUnanimity, Utilitarianism, Welfarism, Stochastic Dominance

Utilitarianism or Welfarism: Does it Make a Difference?

We show that it is possible to reconcile the utilitarian and welfarist principles under the requirement of unanimity provided that the set of profiles over which the consensus is attained is rich enough. More precisely, we identify a closedness condition which, if satisfied by a class of n-tuples of utility functions, guarantees that the rankings of social states induced by utilitarian and welfarist unanimities over that class are identical. We illustrate the importance of the result for the measurement of unidimensional as well as multidimensional inequalities from a dominance point of view.Unanimity; Utilitarianism; Welfarism; Stochastic Dominance; Inequality

How does Clubs' Organizational Design Affect Competition Among Clubs?

We analyze competition among clubs in which the status of club members is the crucial added value accruing to fellow club members through social interaction within the club (e.g. in country clubs, academic faculties, or internet communities). In the course of competition for new members, clubs trade off the effect of entry on average status of the club and candidates’ monetary payment via an entrance fee. We show that the best candidates join the best clubs but they pay higher entrance fees than some lowerranking candidates. We distinguish among various decision rules and organizational set-ups, including majority voting, unanimity, and meritocracy. We find that, from a second-best welfare perspective, the unanimity rule leads to inefficient exclusion of some candidates, while meritocracy leads to inefficient inclusion. Our main policy implication is that consensus-based clubs, such as many academic faculties in Europe, could improve the well-being of their members if they liberalized their internal decision making processes.club theory;status organizations;design of decision making;collective action

How Does Clubs' Organizational Design Affect Competition Among Clubs?

We analyze competition among clubs in which the status of club members is the crucial added value accruing to fellow club members through social interaction within the club (e.g. in country clubs, academic faculties, or internet communities). In the course of competition for new members, clubs trade off the effect of entry on average status of the club and candidates’ monetary payment via an entrance fee. We show that the best candidates join the best clubs but they pay higher entrance fees than some lowerranking candidates. We distinguish among various decision rules and organizational set-ups, including majority voting, unanimity, and meritocracy. We find that, from a second-best welfare perspective, the unanimity rule leads to inefficient exclusion of some candidates, while meritocracy leads to inefficient inclusion. Our main policy implication is that consensus-based clubs, such as many academic faculties in Europe, could improve the well-being of their members if they liberalized their internal decision making processes.club theory;status organizations;design of decision making;collective action

Utilitarian Collective Choice and Voting

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow’s theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow’s theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of preferences being explicitly rejected. In this paper I point out that all voting methods are cardinal and therefore outside the reach of Arrow’s result. Parallel to Arrow’s ordinal approach, there evolved a consistent cardinal theory of collective choice. This theory, most prominently associated with the work of Harsanyi, continued the older utilitarian tradition in a more formal style. The purpose of this paper is to show that various derivations of utilitarian SWFs can also be used to derive utilitarian voting (UV). By this I mean a voting rule that allows the voter to score each alternative in accordance with a given scale. UV-k indicates a scale with k distinct values. The general theory leaves k to be determined on pragmatic grounds. A (1,0) scale gives approval voting. I prefer the scale (1,0,-1) and refer to the resulting voting rule as evaluative voting. A conclusion of the paper is that the defects of conventional voting methods result not from Arrow’s theorem, but rather from restrictions imposed on voters’ expression of their preferences. The analysis is extended to strategic voting, utilizing a novel set of assumptions regarding voter behavior

Clustering the information space using top-ranking sentences : a study of user interaction

By considering sentences selected by a query-biased sentence extraction model from the top-retrieved documents, we create a personalised information space which is characterised by the presence of search terms. We cluster this information space, and enable searchers to interact with the resulting clusters. In order to examine whether users can recognise, and benefit from, the clustered organisation, we compare user interaction and performance between an actual clustering and a pseudo-clustering of the information space for completing information seeking tasks. The results provide evidence for the utility and meaningfulness of the clustered organisation

Unionism and peer-referencing

This study assesses the “fair-wage-effort” hypothesis, by examining (a) the relationship between relative wage comparisons and job satisfaction and quitting intensions, and (b) the relative ranking of stated effort inducing-incentives, in a novel dataset of unionised and non-unionised European employees. By distinguishing between downward and upward-looking wage comparisons, it is shown that wage comparisons to similar workers exert an asymmetric impact on the job satisfaction of union workers, a pattern consistent with inequity-aversion and conformism to the reference point. Moreover, union workers evaluate peer observation and good industrial relations more highly than payment and other incentives. In contrast, non-union workers are found to be more status-seeking in their satisfaction responses and less dependent on their peers in their effort choices The results are robust to endogenous union membership, considerations of generic loss aversion and across different tenure profiles. They are supportive of the individual egalitarian bias of collective wage determination and self-enforcing effort norms.EPICURUS, a project supported by the European Commission through the 5th Framework Programme “Improving Human Potential” (contract number: HPSE-CT-2002-00143

Evaluation of Corporate Sustainability

As a consequence of an increasing demand in sustainable development for business organizations, the evaluation of corporate sustainability has become a topic intensively focused by academic researchers and business practitioners. Several techniques in the context of multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) have been suggested to facilitate the evaluation and the analysis of sustainability performance. However, due to the complexity of evaluation, such as a compilation of quantitative and qualitative measures, interrelationships among various sustainability criteria, the assessor’s hesitation in scoring, or incomplete information, simple techniques may not be able to generate reliable results which can reflect the overall sustainability performance of a company. This paper proposes a series of mathematical formulations based upon the evidential reasoning (ER) approach which can be used to aggregate results from qualitative judgments with quantitative measurements under various types of complex and uncertain situations. The evaluation of corporate sustainability through the ER model is demonstrated using actual data generated from three sugar manufacturing companies in Thailand. The proposed model facilitates managers in analysing the performance and identifying improvement plans and goals. It also simplifies decision making related to sustainable development initiatives. The model can be generalized to a wider area of performance assessment, as well as to any cases of multiple criteria analysis