Abstract
The incompleteness of behavioral preferences can lead many or even all allocations to qualify as Pareto optimal. But this incompleteness does not undercut the ability of utilitarianism to make precise allocative decisions and does not require a planner to supply the preference comparisons that individuals are unable to make for themselves. While classical utilitarianism does not apply to incomplete preferences, social decision-making can be subdivided into distinct problems to which utilitarian methods can be applied. Nonseparabilities in consumption can reduce the precision of policy advice but in all cases the dimension of the set of utilitarian optima drops substantially compared to the set of Pareto optima.
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