Money-metric utilitarianism

Money-metric utilitarianism

We discuss a method of ranking allocations in economic environments which applies when we do not know the names or preferences of individual agents. We require that two allocations can be ranked with the knowledge only of their aggregate bundles and community indifference sets–a condition we refer to as aggregate independence. We also postulate a basic Pareto and continuity property, and a prop...

Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences California Institute of Technology Pasadena, California 91125 Money Metric Utilitarianism

We discuss a method of ranking allocations in economic environments which applies when we do not know the names or preferences of individual agents. We require that two allocations can be ranked with the knowledge only of their aggregate bundles and community indifference sets–a condition we refer to as aggregate independence. We also postulate a basic Pareto and continuity property, and a prop...

The Money Metric Utility Frontier and Aggregate Index Numbers

The paper proposes the money metric utility frontier as the basic unifying concept for an applicable theory of aggregate welfare measurement. The concept is related to conventional index numbers of aggregate real consumption and the aggregate cost-of-living, as well as to consumer surplus. Current developments and controversies, related for example to the use of chain indexes in measuring CPI a...

Utilitarianism and Personal Identity

Statistical utilitarianism

We show that, in a sufficiently large population satisfying certain statistical regularities, it is often possible to accurately estimate the utilitarian social welfare function, even if we only have very noisy data about individual utility functions and interpersonal utility comparisons. In particular, we show that it is often possible to identify an optimal or close-to-optimal utilitarian soc...