`Relative Utilitarianism' (RU) is a version of classical utilitarianism, where each person's utility function is rescaled to range from zero to one. As a voting system, RU is vulnerable to preference exaggeration by strategic voters. The Groves-Clarke Pivotal Mechanism elicits truthful...

The Clarke Pivotal Voting Mechanism (CPVM) elicits truthful revelation of utility functions by requiring any `pivotal' voter to pay a monetary `Clarke tax'. This neglects wealth effects and gives disproportionate power to rich voters. We propose to replace the `Clarke tax' with a lottery,...

We develop a model of social choice over lotteries, where people's psychological characteristics are mutable, their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we suppose individual preferences are described by a...

We propose a mathematical model of `approximate' interpersonal comparisons of well-being, in terms of an incomplete preorder over a space of `psychophysical states'. We argue that this model is consistent with people's intuitions about interpersonal comparisons, intertemporal preferences, and...

We develop a model of preference aggregation where people's psychological characteristics are mutable (hence, potential objects of individual or social choice), their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we consider...

Suppose it is possible to make approximate interpersonal comparisons of welfare gains and losses. Thus, if w, x, y, and z are personal psychophysical states (each encoding all ethically relevant information about the physical and mental state of a person), then it sometimes possible to say,...

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all...