Measurement Theory and the Foundations of Utilitarianism

Harsanyi used expected utility theory to provide two axiomatizations of weighted utilitarian rules. Sen (and later, Weymark) has argued that Harsanyi has not, in fact, axiomatized utilitarianism because he has misapplied expected utility theory. Specifically, Sen and Weymark have argued that von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory is an ordinal theory and, therefore, any increasing transform of a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function is a satisfactory representation of a preference relation over lotteries satisfying the expected utility axioms. However, Harsanyi's version of utilitarianism requires a cardinal theory of utility in which only von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions are acceptable representations of preferences. Broome has argued that von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory is cardinal in the relevant sense needed to support Harsanyi's utilitarian conclusions. His basic point is that a preference binary relation is not a complete description of preferences in the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory. Rather, the preference relation needs to be supplemented by a binary operation, and it is this operation that makes the theory cardinal. Broome does not provide a formal argument in support of this conclusion. In this article, measurement theory is used to critically evaluate Broome's claims. It is shown that the criticisms of Harsanyi's theory by Sen and Weymark can be extended to the more complete description of expected utility theory that is obtained by using the mixture operators that appear in von Neumann and Morgenstern's original description of expected utility theory in addition to a preference relationexpected utility, utilitarianism, von Neumann-Morgenstern, Harsanyi

Social Choice with Analytic Preferences

A social welfare function is a mapping from a set of profiles of individual preference orderings to the set of social orderings of a universal set of alternatives. A social choice correspondence specifies a nonempty subset of the agenda for each admissible preference profile and each admissible agenda. We provide examples of economic and political preference domains for which the Arrow social welfare function axioms are inconsistent, but whose choice-theoretic counterparts (with nondictatorship strengthened to anonymity) yield a social choice correspondence possibility theorem when combined with a natural agenda domain. In both examples, agendas are compact subsets of the nonnegative orthant of a multidimensional Euclidean space. In our first possibility theorem, we consider the standard Euclidean spatial model used in many political models. An agenda can be interpreted as being the feasible vectors of public goods given the resource constraints faced by a legislature. Preferences are restricted to be Euclidean spatial preferences. Our second possibility theorem is for economic domains. Alternatives are interpreted as being vectors of public goods. Preferences are monotone and representable by an analytic utility function with no critical points. Convexity of preferences can also be assumed. Many of the utility functions used in economic models, such as Cobb-Douglas and CES, are analytic. Further, the set of monotone, convex, and analytic preference orderings is dense in the set of continuous, monotone, convex preference orderings. Thus, our preference domain is a large subset of the classical domain of economic preferences. An agenda can be interpreted as the set of feasible allocations given an initial resource endowment and the firms' production technologies. To establish this theorem, an ordinal version of the Analytic Continuation Principle is developed.

Multidimensional generalized Gini indices.

The axioms used to characterize the generalized Gini social evaluation orderings for one-dimensional distributions are extended to the multidimensional attributes case. A social evaluation ordering is shown to have a two-stage aggregation representation if these axioms and a separability assumption are satisfied. In the first stage, the distributions of each attribute are aggregated using generalized Gini social evaluation functions. The functional form of the second-stage aggregator depends on the number of attributes and on which version of a comonotonic additivity axiom is used. The implications of these results for the corresponding multidimensional indices of relative and absolute inequality are also considered.Generalized Gini; multidimensional inequality

Candidate Stability and Nonbinary Social Choice

A desirable property of a voting procedure is that it be immune to the strategic withdrawal of a candidate for election. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) have established a number of theorems that demonstrate that this condition is incompatible with some other desirable properties of voting procedures. This article shows that Grether and Plott's nonbinary generalization of Arrow's Theorem can be used to provide simple proofs of two of these impossibility theorems.Une des propriétés désirables d’une procédure de vote est qu’elle doit être exempte de retrait stratégique d’un candidat à l’élection. Duttu, Jackson et Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) ont établi des théorèmes démontrant que cette propriété est incompatible avec certaines propriétés désirables de procédures de vote. Cet article montre que la généralisation non binaire du théorème d’Arrow par Grether et Plott peut être utilisée pour faire une démonstration assez simple de deux de ces théorèmes d’impossibilité

Social Choice: Recent Developments

In the past quarter century, there has been a dramatic shift of focus in social choice theory, with structured sets of alternatives and restricted domains of the sort encountered in economic problems coming to the fore. This article provides an overview of some of the recent contributions to four topics in normative social choice theory in which economic modelling has played a prominent role: Arrovian social choice theory on economic domains, variable-population social choice, strategy-proof social choice, and axiomatic models of resource allocation

Strategic nonlinear income tax competition with perfect labor mobility

Tax competition between two governments who choose nonlinear income tax schedules to maximize the average utility of its residents when skills are unobservable and labor is perfectly mobile is examined. We show that there are no Nash equilibria in which there is a skill type that pays positive taxes to one country and whose utility is larger than the average utility in the other country or in which the lowest skilled are subsidized. We also show that it is possible for the most highly skilled to receive a net transfer funded by taxes on lower skilled individuals in equilibrium. These findings confirm the race-to-the-bottom thesis in this setting

An axiomatic characterization of the MVSHN group fitness ordering

In order to analyze a unicellular-multicellular evolutionary transition, a multicellular organism is identified with the vector of viabilities and fecundities of its constituent cells. The Michod–Viossat–Solari–Hurand–Nedelcu index of group fitness for a multicellular organism is a function of these cell viabilities and fecundities. The MVSHN index has been used to analyze the germ-soma specialization and the fitness decoupling between the cell and organism levels that takes place during the transition to multicellularity. In this article, social choice theory is used to provide an axiomatic characterization of the group fitness ordering of vectors of cell viabilities and fecundities underlying the MVSHN index

Extensive Social Choice and the Measurement of Group Fitness in Biological Hierarchies

Extensive social choice theory is used to study the problem of measuring group fitness in a two-level biological hierarchy. Both fixed and variable group size are considered. Axioms are identified that imply that the group measure satisfies a form of consequentialism in which group fitness only depends on the viabilities and fecundities of the individuals at the lower level in the hierarchy. This kind of consequentialism can take account of the group fitness advantages of germ-soma specialization, which is not possible with an alternative social choice framework proposed by Okasha, but which is an essential feature of the index of group fitness for a multicellular organism introduced by Michod, Viossat, Solari, Hurand, and Nedelcu to analyze the unicellular-multicellular evolutionary transition. The new framework is also used to analyze the fitness decoupling between levels that takes place during an evolutionary transition

Strategy-proof club formation with indivisible club facilities

We investigate the strategy-proof provision and financing of indivisible club good facilities when individuals are subject to congestion costs that are non-decreasing in the number of other club members and in a private type parameter. An allocation rule specifies how the individuals are to be partitioned into clubs and how the costs of the facilities are to be shared by club members as a function of the types. We show that some combinations of our axioms are incompatible when congestion costs are continuous and strictly increasing in the type parameter, but that all of them are compatible if congestion costs are dichotomous and there is equal cost sharing. We present a number of examples of allocation rules with equal cost sharing and determine which of our axioms they satisfy when the congestion cost is linear in the type parameter. We also show that using iterative voting on ascending size to determine a club partition is not, in general, strategy-proof when each facility’s cost is shared equally

Arrow's Theorem with a fixed feasible alternative

Arrow's Theorem, in its social choice function formulation, assumes that all nonempty finite subsets of the universal set of alternatives is potentially a feasible set. We demonstrate that the axioms in Arrow's Theorem, with weak Pareto strengthened to strong Pareto, are consistent if it is assumed that there is a prespecified alternative which is in every feasible set. We further show that if the collection of feasible sets consists of all subsets of alternatives containing a prespecified list of alternatives and if there are at least three additional alternatives not on this list, replacing nondictatorship by anonymity results in an impossibility theorem.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/47085/1/355_2004_Article_BF00450993.pd