Interpersonal Comparisons and Utilitarian Social Choice
Abstract
Interpersonal comparisons of utility scales have been considered to be
meaningless. Therefore, utilitarian voting consisting of individual
preference ratings on some utility scale as inputs has been considered
unscientific. We show a particular method consisting of a hybrid of
utilitarian and approval voting or choosing for which individual utility
scales need not be comparable since the results are the same for any
affine linear transformation of the utility scale. Therefore, the issue
of interpersonal comparisons is moot.