On the stability of utilitarian aggregation (opens in new tab)

In the context of aggregating von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, we show that bounded violations of the Pareto conditions characterize aggregation rules that are approximately utilitarian. When a single utility function is intended to represent the preference judgments of a group of individuals and the Pareto principles are nearly satisfied, we prove that its distance from a weighted sum of individual cardinal utilities does not exceed half ...