Harsanyi’s theorem without the sure-thing principle: On the consistent aggregation of Monotonic Bernoullian and Archimedean preferences

Stéphane Zuber (1, 2, 3)

1 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
2 PSE - Paris School of Economics
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

This paper studies the extension of Harsanyi’s theorem (Harsanyi, 1955) in a framework involving uncertainty. It seeks to extend the aggregation result to a wide class of Monotonic Bernoullian and Archimedean preferences (Cerreia-Vioglio et al., 2011) that subsumes many models of choice under uncertainty proposed in the literature. An impossibility result is obtained, unless we are in the specific framework where all individuals and the social observer are subjective expected utility maximizers sharing the same beliefs. This implies that non-expected utility preferences cannot be aggregated consistently.

Mots clés: Monotonic Bernoullian and Archimedean preferences; Subjective expected utility; Harsanyi’s theorem; Pareto principle

Domaines: Economies et finances

Stéphane Zuber. Harsanyi’s theorem without the sure-thing principle: On the consistent aggregation of Monotonic Bernoullian and Archimedean preferences. Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2016, ⟨10.1016/j.jmateco.2015.12.007⟩. ⟨hal-01300587⟩