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  3. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics
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  5. Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions

American Economic Journal:
Microeconomics

ISSN 1945-7669 (Print) | ISSN 1945-7685 (Online)

Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions

  • Shiri Alon
  • Ehud Lehrer
American Economic Journal: Microeconomics (Forthcoming)

Abstract

We provide axioms that relate the preferences of each group in a society to the preferences of the subgroups contained in them. These axioms yield cardinal utility indices for each individual and a representation of group preferences as the group-dependent weighted sum of the utility indices of the members of that group. We show that these weights are group-independent whenever one additional axiom, and a mild linear independence assumption are satisfied.

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