Accommodating Procedural Fairness When Harsanyi's Impartial Observer is a Utilitarian: An Axiomatization

Abstract

We propose and axiomatically characterize, within Harsanyi's impartial observer setting, a utilitarian social welfare function (SWF) that can accommodate concerns for procedural fairness. Under our proposal, concerns for procedural fairness in social welfare assessments are inherited from individual preferences, rather than being autonomously imposed at the societal level. Our axioms allow us to represent individual preferences through all-inclusive utility functions that can accommodate attitudes toward both risk and procedural fairness. They also establish that social welfare assessments can be made based on a weighted average of these all-inclusive individual utilities.