RECONCILING INTERPERSONAL COMPARABILITY AND THE INTENSITY OF PREFERENCE FOR THE UTILITY SUM-RULE

It is shown that the utility sum rule as a method of social choice can be used to generate increasing decisiveness by restricting the range of individual utilities that may be assigned. This procedure is open t o a dual interpretation, with restrictions varying either through the use of the degree of comparability (which reflects interpersonal trade -offs) or through the newly introduced degree of ordinality (which ref lects the intensity of preference between alternatives). The two proce dures can be traded off against each other with greater interpersonal weights to the worse-off corresponding to greater aversion to satisfyi ng higher levels of preference in individual orderings. This is analog ous to a similar exercise in the measurement of income inequality, whe re aversion to inequality is equivalent to interpersonal weights in fa vour of the poor (or against the wealthy).