Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2017

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Subjective utilitarianism: Decisions in a social context

Shiri Alon*, Ehud Lehrer

Last modified: 2017-04-18

Abstract


A model of other-regarding preferences is presented, whereby individual decisions are subjectively affected by others. A decision maker has a grand group of significant others. Each sub-group of significant others is a possible social context, and the decision maker has (potentially) different preferences in different social contexts. An axiomatic characterization of such other-regarding preferences is offered, the characterized representation taking 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.