Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility for People With Non-trivial p-Additive Joint Receipts

Abstract

This article argues that there is a natural solution to carrying out interpersonal comparisons of utility when the theory is supplemented with a group operation of joint receipts. If so, 3 types of people can exist, and the 2 types with multiplicative representations of joint receipt have, in contrast to most utility theories, absolute scales of utility. That makes possible, at least in principle, meaningful interpersonal comparisons of utility with desirable properties, thus resolving a long standing philosophical problem having potentially important implications in economics. Two behavioral criteria are given for the 3 classes of people. At this point their relative sizes are unknown.

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