{"title":"Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population.","authors":"Dean Spears, Stéphane Zuber","doi":"10.1007/s00355-022-01440-4","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Utilitarianism is the most prominent social welfare function in economics. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively-separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and individuals' welfares. We first show that, given uncontroversial basic axioms, Blackorby et al.'s (1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism is equivalent to a new axiom holding that it is better to allocate higher utility-conditional-on-existence to possible people who have a higher probability of existence. The other two characterizations extend and clarify classic axiomatizations of utilitarianism from settings with either social risk or variable-population, considered alone.</p>","PeriodicalId":47663,"journal":{"name":"Social Choice and Welfare","volume":"61 1","pages":"101-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10751882/pdf/","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Choice and Welfare","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-022-01440-4","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/12/7 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
Utilitarianism is the most prominent social welfare function in economics. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively-separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and individuals' welfares. We first show that, given uncontroversial basic axioms, Blackorby et al.'s (1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism is equivalent to a new axiom holding that it is better to allocate higher utility-conditional-on-existence to possible people who have a higher probability of existence. The other two characterizations extend and clarify classic axiomatizations of utilitarianism from settings with either social risk or variable-population, considered alone.
期刊介绍：
Social Choice and Welfare explores all aspects, both normative and positive, of welfare economics, collective choice, and strategic interaction. Topics include but are not limited to: preference aggregation, welfare criteria, fairness, justice and equity, rights, inequality and poverty measurement, voting and elections, political games, coalition formation, public goods, mechanism design, networks, matching, optimal taxation, cost-benefit analysis, computational social choice, judgement aggregation, market design, behavioral welfare economics, subjective well-being studies and experimental investigations related to social choice and voting. As such, the journal is inter-disciplinary and cuts across the boundaries of economics, political science, philosophy, and mathematics. Articles on choice and order theory that include results that can be applied to the above topics are also included in the journal. While it emphasizes theory, the journal also publishes empirical work in the subject area reflecting cross-fertilizing between theoretical and empirical research. Readers will find original research articles, surveys, and book reviews.Officially cited as: Soc Choice Welf
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