Social Aggregation and the Expected Utility Hypothesis

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Abstract
Sen?s social-evaluation-functional framework is used to reformulate Harsanyi?s social aggregation problem so that both single-profile and multi-profile issues can be considered with allowance made for different assumptions concerning the measurability and comparability of individual utilities. Uncertainty is modelled using state-contingent alternatives with fixed state probabilities. Individual utility functions and social preferences are required to satisfy the expected utility hypothesis. On various domains, we investigate the extent to which the expected utility hypothesis can provide support for weighted utilitarianism when the social aggregation procedure is Paretian.