Subjective utilitarianism: Individual decisions in a social context

Shiri Alon; Ehud Lehrer

doi:10.1016/j.jet.2020.105108

Subjective utilitarianism: Individual decisions in a social context

Shiri Alon, Ehud Lehrer

Department of Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Individual decisions are often subjectively affected by other-regarding considerations. We model a decision maker influenced by a grand group of significant others. Each sub-group of significant others is a possible social context, and the decision maker has different preferences in different social contexts. An axiomatic characterization of such preferences is offered. The characterized representation takes a simple subjective utilitarian form: (a) the decision maker ascribes to each significant other a utility function, representing the decision maker's subjective perception of this other person's tastes, and (b) in any specific social context the decision maker evaluates alternatives by adding together her or his own personal utility and the sum of all group members' utilities as subjectively perceived by the decision maker.

Original language	English
Article number	105108
Journal	Journal of Economic Theory
Volume	190
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2020.105108
State	Published - Nov 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.

Funding

The authors are thankful to Gabi Gayer, Itzhak Gilboa, Yoram Halevy, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson and David Schmeidler for helpful comments. Shiri Alon thanks the Israel Science Foundation , grant number 1188/14 , Ehud Lehrer acknowledges partial financial support of the Israel Science Foundation , grant number 963/15 , and both authors thank the Pinhas Sapir Center for Economic Development at Tel Aviv University for financial support. Part of this research was done while the first author was visiting the Department of Economics at the University of Washington. The author is grateful to the department for its hospitality. The authors are thankful to Gabi Gayer, Itzhak Gilboa, Yoram Halevy, Andrew Postlewaite, Larry Samuelson and David Schmeidler for helpful comments. Shiri Alon thanks the Israel Science Foundation, grant number 1188/14, Ehud Lehrer acknowledges partial financial support of the Israel Science Foundation, grant number 963/15, and both authors thank the Pinhas Sapir Center for Economic Development at Tel Aviv University for financial support. Part of this research was done while the first author was visiting the Department of Economics at the University of Washington. The author is grateful to the department for its hospitality.

Funders	Funder number
University of Washington
Israel Science Foundation	963/15, 1188/14
Tel Aviv University

Keywords

Axiomatization
Other-regarding preferences
Social context
Subjective utilitarianism

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10.1016/j.jet.2020.105108

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Subjective utilitarianism: Individual decisions in a social context

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

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