Commitment and anticipated utilitarianism
Résumé
Much empirical evidence demonstrates that individual preferences may not be consistent. This leads to an important question: how should societal preferences be formulated when individuals behave inconsistently? This paper, restricted to a class of preferences, addresses this question by (1) proposing a new method to rationalize individual preferences; (2) introducing a new version of Pareto principle with respect to the rationalized preferences; and (3) characterizing the societal preferences which respect this principle.