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Research Seminars
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Research Seminars
Wednesday, August 26, 2:00–3:00 PM
Location: C3, Room 3015
Speaker: Niels Boissonnet, Bielefeld University, Germany
Title: Consensus on the Lesser of Two Evils
Abstract:

We propose a new ordinal axiom for interpersonal comparisons, Consensus on the Lesser of Two Evils. It requires that whenever both agents agree that the position one allocation assigns to one of them is better than the position another allocation assigns to the other, society ranks the first above the second. Imposed on all bundles, the axiom is incompatible with Pareto efficiency as soon as the two agents’ preferences differ; restricted to the positions the efficient frontier makes available, it yields a sharp representation. We show that a social preference satisfies the axiom if and only if it is represented by a mixed-benchmark metric: the welfare of agent (i) is the sum (m_i^1 + m_i^2) of two continuous increasing representations of (\succsim_i), where for each (k \in {1,2}) the pair ((m_1^k,m_2^k)) agrees on agent (k)’s projection of the frontier, that is, (m_1^k(x)=m_2^k(x)) for every bundle (x) that agent (k) receives in some Pareto-efficient allocation. Because the axiom bears only on single-recipient allocations, the representation constrains the calibration of welfare alone and holds for any aggregation rule—utilitarian, prioritarian, or leximin. We relate the result to existing welfare indices built on a single reference path, and show that our criterion is logically independent of envy-freeness while always compatible with it, and that it symmetrizes Suppes’s grading principle across agents.