Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population - HAL-SHS - Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société
Article Dans Une Revue Social Choice and Welfare Année : 2022

Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population

Résumé

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.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03895384 , version 1 (12-12-2022)

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Dean Spears, Stéphane Zuber. Foundations of utilitarianism under risk and variable population. Social Choice and Welfare, 2022, ⟨10.1007/s00355-022-01440-4⟩. ⟨halshs-03895384⟩
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