Aggregating Wrong Preferences

[Uzi Segal]

Hi all

A new paper: Aggregating Wrong Preferences (Uzi Segal and Zhuzhu Zhou)

Abstract
In a social choice setting, individuals may be unwilling to aggregate their
preferences with what they regard as wrong preferences held by others 

because they lead to outcomes that harm themselves, harm others, are socially
inefficient, or are morally unacceptable. People may still be willing to compromise 

with those who believe that although such preferences are wrong, society
should nonetheless accept them. We offer two methods of two-level aggregation 

for such situations. In the first method, each member of society first
aggregates the “corrected” individual preferences, and society then aggregates
these aggregated views. In the second method, for each person, society first
aggregates everyone’s views about that person’s preferences, and then 

aggregates the resulting individual “corrected” preferences. If these two methods
yield the same social ranking, then the aggregation rule must be the sum of
functions of the corrected utilities.

Best

uzi