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A Methodological Assessment of Multiple Utility Frameworks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2008

Timothy J. Brennan
Timothy J. Brennan
Affiliation:
George Washington University
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Extract

One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable (Arrow, 1951; De-breu, 1959). The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made (Sen, 1982a). The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world.

Type
Essays
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , October 1989 , pp. 189 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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