AlexMennen comments on Harsanyi's Social Aggregation Theorem and what it means for CEV - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (86)
Under Harsanyi's original axioms, you cannot say anything about the signs of the coefficients. My axioms are slightly stronger, but I think still not quite enough. However, if you make the even stronger (but still reasonable, I think) assumption that the agents' utility functions are linearly independent, then you can prove that all of the coefficients are non-negative. This is because the linear independence allows you create situations where each agent prefers A to B by arbitrarily specifiable relative amounts. As in, for all agents k, we can create choices A and B such that every agent prefers A to B, but the margin by which every agent other than k prefers A to B is arbitrarily small compared to the margin by which k prefers A to B, so since FAI prefers A to B, c_k must be nonnegative.