Cardinality and Utilitarianism through Social Interactions
2026-01-28
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. (JEL D11, D71, D81, D83)