The Rational Group

Franz Dietrich (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

Can a group be a standard rational agent? This would require the group to hold aggregate preferences which maximise expected utility and change only by Bayesian updating. Group rationality is possible, but the only preference aggregation rules which support it (and are minimally Paretian and continuous) are the linear-geometric rules, which combine individual tastes linearly and individual beliefs geometrically.

Mots clés: Bayesian aggregation; preference aggregation under uncertainty; expected utility hypothesis for groups; Bayesian revision; rational group agents; linear versus geneometric opinion pooling

Domaines: Economies et finances; Gestion et management; Économie et finance quantitative [q-fin]; Probabilités [math.PR]; Statistiques [stat]

Franz Dietrich. The Rational Group. 2020. ⟨halshs-02905409v2⟩