Norms and Informational Environments in Social Choices.

Many have questioned approaches to social choices that demand much interpersonal comparability of utility, arguing that such comparability is hard to implement in practice. In this paper, extending a result of Blackorby, Bossert, and Donaldson (1999),we prove that a very strong informational environment can be constructed on the basis of a single fuzzy norm and cardinal measurability. Moreover, we show that only if we accept a very strong normalization procedure will we obtain an absolute scale of utility.